From today's Age:
Under the gun
DENT Myers has a friendly presence, rheumy eyes, a firm handshake, a long matted beard that hides his age - at first - and a pair of Colt .45s that he wears loaded and holstered over his denim shorts as he pads about his cluttered Civil War memorabilia shop in the town of Kennesaw, Georgia.
Tourists like to come and get their photographs taken with Dent, and to poke around his narrow shop - properly known as Wildman's Civil War Surplus and Herb Shop. For 25¢ he will pull aside the chain that divides the front room from the back, where he keeps a collection of Civil War long arms and revolvers as well as his collection of excavated artefacts.
Asked why he carries the twin automatics, Myers says in a molasses drawl, ''Well, actually they keep me balanced. If I was just wearing one I'd spend all day walking around in circles.''
Gently pushed he takes the question just a little more seriously. ''Well, actually it's like sucking your thumb, they are a pacifier. Criminals are dumb but they are not stupid. They are going to go where the pickings are easy. These are a deterrent.''
Right at the back of the cluttered store by a rack of army surplus coats stands a mannequin wearing what appear to be Ku Klux Klan robes yellowed with age. On its chest it wears a badge that says, ''Fear the Govt that fears men with guns''.
People in Kennesaw, a town that made itself famous in 1982 by passing a law making it compulsory for the ''head of every household'' to own a firearm and ammunition, tend to have firm views on gun ownership.
The 81-year-old Kennesaw attorney Fred Bentley snr sits in his office in a neat blue suit surrounded by his treasures - a clutch of fossilised dinosaur eggs, an ancient Egyptian burial mask, a shipping document bearing the faded signatures of president George Washington and his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson - and explains how he came to write the Kennesaw law, a story that begins a thousand kilometres north, on the banks of Lake Michigan.
There, in 1981, when the gun control movement was at the height of its powers, the town of Morton Grove, Illinois, banned its citizens from owning guns at all. The law offended the Kennesaw mayor, Darvin Purdy. But worse than the law itself, says Bentley, was the support it received in what today would probably be called the mainstream media.
''They made an awful fuss,'' he says with a flick of his hand.
Purdy decided to knock Morton Grove off the front pages, and had Bentley draft Kennesaw's gun law. Bentley and his son drew up the ordinance, dodging constitutional problems by granting exceptions to the mad and the infirm, to ''paupers'' and to conscientious objectors. The law passed with the full support of the council, and it later survived a federal court challenge by a civil rights group.
Bentley remains proud of the Kennesaw gun law. He claims crime rates plummeted, particularly for burglary, and the law attracted new citizens and tourists. Best of all a point had been made to the sneering north.
Somewhere in the gulf between Kennesaw and Morton Grove you can come to some understanding of America's attitude towards its guns.
It has not always been this polarised, though guns have always been part of American life. American settlers fled European persecution, armed themselves and defended their colonies. They seized their freedom from the British with guns and when they came to form a government of their own they were so suspicious of any centralised authority they made the right to bear arms the second of the ten amendments they call the Bill of Rights.
In the American imagination, government does not grant certain rights to individuals, rather individuals grudgingly cede some of their God-given rights in order to allow a limited government to be formed.
This is the basis of American individualism and it is still deeply felt. Many own guns because they do not expect the government to protect them even if they had faith that it could. Others view government itself as a threat.
Robert Jones is a Pennsylvanian by birth who moved south later in life and made a beeline for Kennesaw after the law was passed. It made sense to him. These days he runs the local historical society and he has written widely on the Civil War and the gun ordinance. Sitting in the local museum he turns to Thomas Jefferson when he tries to explain how the suspicion of government plays into the thoughts of some gun advocates. ''God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,'' he recites, quoting from the letter that ends with the words, ''The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.''
This suspicion that the government could quickly turn on its people is not uncommon in pro-gun circles.
''That's why we have a second amendment, it's not to go raccoon hunting,'' says Jones, putting on a Southern accent.
To many then the right to bear arms is not a right, but the right. Without it all the others are moot.
Still by early last century there was a growing view that the right to bear arms could be responsibly restricted for the public good, says Adam Winkler, professor of constitutional law at the University of California and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.
Back then the National Rifle Association, which emerged from the Civil War to encourage marksmanship, actually advocated forms of gun control. This was the case up until 1977, when violence was sweeping American cities and the NRA's leadership was co-operating in government plans to restrict the sales of so-called Saturday night specials - the cheap, easily concealed revolvers often used in crime.
A group of NRA hardliners led by Harlon Carter staged a coup and replaced the entire NRA leadership overnight during a Cincinnati convention. Suddenly an organisation that was once concerned with safety training and recreational shooting became a fierce single-minded lobby dedicated to defending the second amendment.
It has successfully seen restrictions on types of firearms repealed, increased the spread of laws protecting the right to carry concealed weapons and spread laws protecting people who use their weapons to kill or maim if they perceive they are under threat in their home and, more recently, on the street.
By the 1994 election the group was powerful enough to start knocking off congressmen who dared disagree, prompting Bill Clinton to write in his memoir, ''The NRA was an unforgiving master: one strike and you're out. The gun lobby claimed to have defeated 19 of the 24 members on its hit list. They did at least that much damage and could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House Speaker.''
By 2004 the NRA and the Republican Party were walking in lockstep and the Democrats were intimidated. It flexed its muscle by having the ban on assault rifles - like the one used in Colorado last week - abolished.
At the moment its power seems unassailable. Since the shooting in Aurora a small handful of Democrats have called for new gun controls, or at least renewed debate over them.
The independent mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, has been the most outspoken critic of the NRA, writing on Thursday in the news service he founded, Bloomberg: ''The NRA is a $200-million-plus-a-year lobbying juggernaut, with much of its funding coming from gun manufacturers and merchandising. More than anything, the NRA is a marketing organisation, and its flagship product is fear. Gun sales jumped after [Barack] Obama was elected President, based on the absurd - and now demonstrably false - fear that he would seek to ban guns.''
In fact the President has never made any move to restrict gun sales or use, and in a speech on Wednesday that touched upon the most recent mass shooting he made only motherhood statements. ''We have to understand that when a child opens fire on another child, there's a hole in that child's heart that government can't fill,'' he said.
He called for restrictions on the sale of assault rifles to the mentally ill, but little else.
The unofficial Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts banned assault rifles, which he described as ''instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people''.
But this week he said, ''Well this person shouldn't have had any kind of weapons and bombs … and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them. And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won't. Changing the heart of the American people may well be what's essential, to improve the lots of the American people.''
He is wrong. So far it appears the accused killer bought the weapons legally and passed his background check.
Either way the reticence of the candidates to engage in the debate in the lead-up to the election is clear.
Even though polls show a nearly even split between those calling for greater restrictions on guns and gun advocates, Winkler says it is not hard to see why the NRA is winning the fight.
Those who support gun control tend to take other matters into account in casting their vote, issues such as the economy, healthcare and the environment. Many of the NRA's supporters are happy to vote on one issue alone, the defence of the single right that guarantees their freedom, the right to bear arms.
''This is democracy, they bring the votes,'' he says.
Winkler thinks much of the debate in America today misses the point in any event. There are, he notes, 311 million Americans and 280 million guns in America. ''There is no point in discussing whether or not there would be less [deaths by gunfire] if there were less guns, that is not on the table any more, it's too late.''
Back in Kennesaw, Fred Bentley is certain guns are contributing to the peace in his little town, even as it is being enveloped by the suburbs of Atlanta. ''We have had one murder and that was with a knife,'' he says with a chuckle. ''We had a warden of a penitentiary in Florida poll his prisoners after our ordinance came out, and the answer to his poll was this: 'I wouldn't hesitate for a minute to go to Morton Grove, Illinois, but I wouldn't step foot in Kennesaw Georgia.'''
Nick O'Malley is US correspondent.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/under-th ... z21tbrE8Ji
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