Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun by Iain Overton Read Free Book Online Page A

cost $180 here, and that was enough for twelve bodies. ‘It will keep a body for a week, even without refrigeration,’ they said, even in this Central American heat.
    Beside the bottles were small plastic bags. They put the intestines inside these. The bags were then sent elsewhere to be burned, and they packed your body with ‘pulverised hardening compound’ instead.
    After a while I shook their hands, and they told me to stay, to come back soon, but I wanted to leave. I did not want to knowmore about plastic bags filled with intestines or skulls filled with balloons. And the smell had long ago seeped into my clothes.
    I had seen enough of death’s ugly business – I knew all too well what the gun could do. I just wanted to head back to the land of the living. Or, at the least I wanted to see a glimmer of hope in all of this sunless despair; so I left and sought instead to meet those who had managed to survive the gun’s barbed impact.

III. Power

6. THE CRIMINALS
    A surprising video and gangland killings – El Salvador – meeting ‘the Shooter’ and drinking to the Beast – tea with a spook – secret graves and grave secrets – Holland and Ecuador – personal trauma of guns recalled – memories of Papua New Guinea – a gunpoint mugging and hard justice seen
    The video was of a New York that no longer exists. Mean streets against a dripping industrial grime. So far removed from today’s Manhattan’s chic and West Village bearded hipster irony, it wasn’t even New York. They called the song ‘Gotham Fucking City’. The three-minute, twenty-second video was the story of Paris Lane’s death – a suicide captured in song. A eulogy in gritty rap by the singers Smoke DZA and Joey Bada$$, with lyrics as hard as the story it was telling.
    Life’s a gamble need my own pair of dice this time,
    All I ask is for friends without parasitic minds,
    But that’s as seldom as Paris city crimes.
    The video told how Paris Lane had not killed himself in that New York lift lobby because of depression or demons or other silent assassins, but because of a drugs deal gone wrong. Having read the comments under Paris’s suicide video, I had searched some more and found this rap video. It was not a story I had visualised. Only the ending was familiar. The last frames in the music video showed theimage of a young man stood before a closing lift, a gun in his mouth, but this scene was intercut with others: young thugs with guns seeking vengeance, lurking at the tower block’s doorway.
    The hooded men were shown in the film being robbed twice. The first time Paris had seized their drugs. The second time he had denied them their chance at dispensing a brutal form of street justice. Perhaps Paris knew, schooled as he was on the city’s sidewalks, that he couldn’t get away with what he had done, so he chose a different road.
    The comments below the online video were illuminating. ‘R.I.P. paradise he killed his self before everybody he robbed killed him first,’ someone had written. Underneath it another said: ‘Supposedly he wanted out of a gang and they were going to kill him so the last thing he did was say goodbye to his girl before leaving on his own terms.’
    Perhaps it wasn’t a suicide at all. Not in the strictest sense, at least. Rather just the bloody ending of a gangland disagreement. Something that had gone so far south that the only way for Paris to find a way out was to put gunmetal in his mouth.
    Truth is sometimes hard to see. It’s even harder when there’s a gun in the way.
    I began to search for the people who wrote the comments. They had indurate street names. One emailed a reply but I won’t say who because in the world of street gangs, that can be as good as chiselling a name on a gravestone. He told me Paris was in no mood for suicide.
    ‘i [ sic ] can’t tell you who he was in trouble with. Some guys from the hood. I heard his old gang friends tried to get him but nobody talks about this