Peter Charley - How to Sell a Massacre

Contents

To Clare and Tom

Contents

I n more than a decade working as a US-based journalist, Ive witnessed a staggering level of gun violence in America. In fact, the number of people killed by guns in the US since 1963 the year President John F. Kennedy was shot to death is now estimated to be more than double the number of US soldiers who died in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War and the Iraq war combined.

How has this crisis developed and why has it been allowed to continue?

In 2016, I launched an investigation for Al Jazeera in an effort to find out. I wanted to understand how the US gun lobby continues to enjoy the support of Congress, the White House and millions of Americans as gun violence ravages their nation.

The three-year investigation involved the recording of more than five hundred hours of undercover video, and it led my team back to Australia my home country and to the political party, Pauline Hansons One Nation.

This book gives a detailed, behind-the-scenes account of the investigation and the making of the two-part documentary How to Sell a Massacre that emerged from it. I have included key scenes from unreleased, covertly recorded video, and I reveal previously undisclosed conversations between Al Jazeeras undercover operatives, the National Rifle Association of America, and the One Nation delegates as they travelled to the US in September 2018, in search of funding and support from the American gun lobby.

Though Al Jazeera played no part in the production or publication of this book, the network allowed me full access to footage recorded for the investigation, and to transcripts of all discussions captured for the assignment. Quotes in this book are taken directly from those recordings and transcripts, and from contemporaneous notes I had made as I oversaw the project.

C ameraman Colin McIntyre sat hunched over a lamp in his hotel room in Louisville, Kentucky, squinting through the holes of a loose shirt button.

Can you see the lens?

Rodger Muller leaned down and peered at the button.

The lens?

Colin carefully pushed a needle and thread through the holes of the button, into the shirt, and drew a strand of dark cotton high into the air.

The camera lens. Its in the button. You cant see it?

He worked the thread back and forth as he stitched the tiny button camera onto the shirt that Rodger would wear the following day.

Because if you cant see it, they wont see it.

He handed the shirt to Rodger, who slipped it on and walked to the wardrobe mirror.

Bloody amazing, he said, leaning into his reflection. He twisted to see whether the hotel room light might pick up the pinhead-sized lens concealed within the button. No one would ever know.

Colin tossed his sewing kit into his Pelican camera case and snapped the lid shut.

Thats the whole idea, mate.

The hidden camera was one of three that Rodger would wear on the first day of the National Rifle Associations May 2016 annual meeting, which would begin just after dawn.

Colin had also sewn a lens into Rodgers sports coat, and he had concealed another in a mobile phone Rodger would carry as he wandered through the 500,000-square-foot firearms display that the NRA had set up in Louisvilles vast Exposition Center.

I had hired Rodger at the beginning of that year as part of an elaborate effort to infiltrate Americas gun lobby. The mission I had given him was simple enough, but it had the potential to cause Rodger enormous complications at home: he was to adopt a new persona that of a gun-loving Aussie who wanted a softening of Australias strict gun control laws.

At the NRAs Louisville convention, he was to spread the message that hed formed the group Gun Rights Australia specifically to lobby for the reform of firearms laws Down Under. He was to engage with the NRAs senior leadership, and to wear concealed cameras to secretly film conversations inside the group.

Apart from my bosses and a small team from Al Jazeeras Investigative Unit that I had assembled for this assignment, nobody knew that Rodgers pro-gun persona was a ruse not even his closest friends and family.

He slipped off his shirt and draped it over a coat hanger. The concealed cameras were ready. And in a few hours, Rodger Muller would begin his new life as a gun fanatic.

* * *

No guns, no knives, no umbrellas, folks!

No umbrellas?

The security teams were taking no chances as they herded people into the convention centre the next morning to hear speeches from NRA leaders Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox at the official opening of the event. Among the many dignitaries who would also speak was US presidential candidate Donald Trump.

In front of a standing-room-only audience, LaPierre walked onto the stage, resplendent in a blue suit and blue silk tie, and stood before the iconic image of US marines straining to hoist the American flag in the Battle of Iwo Jima. For the next seventeen minutes, the NRAs chief executive would fan the fires that keep his organisations five million members angry and engaged.

We know a Hillary Clinton White House would be ground zero for a massive attack on our freedom, he warned.

A haven for all the Hollywood elites to plot the destruction of our Second Amendment.

The elites have huddled in rooms in Washington and New York, San Francisco and Hollywood, and cooked the nomination for Hillary.

On Wall Street, theyll pay you $250,000 a pop to talk in those rooms. Well, maybe not you or me. But if youre Hillary Rodham Clinton you can make a fortune talking in those rooms. And she did.

The mob below him let out a roar. Rodger Muller, standing among them, shouted, Hear, hear, held his hands above his head and applauded.

The truth is that if, God forbid, a terrorist should enter this room, LaPierre continued, he would learn firsthand that the best way for law-abiding Americans to defend their lives the surest way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!, repeating an NRA catchphrase that he introduced after the massacre of twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut four years earlier.

Not even a good guy with an umbrella would have stood a chance against the nightmare LaPierre had invoked today. But the unarmed crowd didnt seem to care about such details.

Again, they shouted their approval, energised by LaPierres contempt for the loathsome, overpaid, gun-hating, hand-wringing socialists, led by Hillary Clinton and her out-of-touch associates the elites.

Worst of all, they were told, Hillary wanted to take Americans guns away just as Australias government had done to its own people a frequent NRA reference point for how bad things can get when governments get involved with gun control.

If she could, Hillary would ban every gun, destroy every magazine, run an entire national security industry into the ground and put your name on a government registration list, he told the crowd.

They think Americans all over the heartland are stupid. Do they think we cant see their tone, their inflection, their agenda?

That LaPierre is paid an estimated one million US dollars a year didnt seem to bother the masses cheering him on. Nor did the $3,767,345 one-off supplemental retirement payout hed received from the NRA the previous year, nor reports that he had spent $274,695.03 on Italian suits between 2004 and 2017.

Something in LaPierres showmanship, something in his pinched-face rage his own tone, his