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America's Second Amendment Sisters believe bearing arms is as natural as giving birth. But in the era of Dunblane and Columbine, can they defend their position?

THE blood-spattered clothing; the blank expressions of slack- jawed disbelief, the grainy photographs of the vengeful killer - indelible images of the aftermath of a gun massacre have become familiar fixtures on news bulletins in recent years. But while in Britain public revulsion at the crime of Thomas Hamilton who killed 16 children and their teacher at Dunblane Primary in March 1996 resulted in tighter gun control, in America similar tragedies, such as the Columbine High School shooting, have seen some communities enthusiastically taking up arms in response.

Pistols, rifles and even machine guns - weaponry of all type and calibre have always been the must-have accessory from Haverbrook, Kentucky to Ogdenville, Nebraska. And though American males have long been associated with guns, we in Britain tend to forget that women in America are equally seduced by cold steel and cordite.

Americans have long held a reputation as over-zealous advocates of gun law to those of us across the Atlantic. But there's a strong whiff of discrimination in our image of the mentally unstable pistol- packing American. We think of so-called "psychos" like Lee Harvey Oswald, Wild Bill Hickcock and Al Capone, but we tend to forget female firebrands such as Ma Baker and Calamity Jane.

But femmes and firearms are as much a way of life in the US as carjacking, crack and apple pie - and they've even set up an organisation to prove it: the Second Amendment Sisters. These women like nothing better than kicking back with light automatic weapons and concealed firearms. To them the constitutional right to bear arms and form a militia, should King George or the federal government come to place the yoke of tyranny around their necks, is more important than church on Sunday or the Americanisation of global culture.

There has always been a certain dangerous sexuality to women with shooters. It's taboo; it's a bit like watching Marlene Dietrich when she's dolled up in a top hat and wearing tails and a bow tie. There's something wicked and thrilling and alluring about it. Well, that was my rather simplistic and British take on ladies who shoot, until, that is, I got down among the Sisters in North Carolina. After my brush with these women, I'm still equally reductivist about things - only now I just think all Americans, and American women in particular, are just downright scary.

These women aren't the floozies with uzis I thought they'd be, they're moms with guns - and that's creepy. There is nothing more disturbing than talking to a suburban housewife who turns out to be a trigger-happy mother. It's a little like being at Abigail's Party and knowing that the next time Demis Roussos comes on the hi-fi Abigail is going to go postal and off you as part of a thrill-kill spree.

The fact that these women carry revolvers doesn't make them any more freakish than their gun-toting husbands. It isn't their sex that singles them out as oddities, it's their straight-up-and-down-mad-as- a-coot dangerous beliefs tacked on to their wholesome-as-apple-pie motherliness.

It would be a mistake to fall into the Myra Hindley school of debate over these women and start castigating them as traitors to motherhood for picking up a handgun. Of course it is fairly repellent to watch a mother show her ten-year-old kid how to shoot a Magnum .45, but it isn't too pleasant to watch daddy do it either.

What is disturbing is the submissiveness of most of these women to their men, together with political opinions which put them just to the right of Jerry Falwell. They manage to combine a mumsy gingham- clad homeliness with rank extremism - like I Love Lucy in a swastika armband.

Take Maria Heil, who is clearly oblivious to the near-perfect irony of her Nazi-esque surname. She's the main spokeswoman for the Second Amendment Sisters, an organisation which grew up via the internet in opposition to the Million Mom March that lobbied Washington DC last May for tighter gun control in the wake of horrific crimes such as the Columbine shooting. Three mothers who lost their children in the Dunblane massacre also took part in the pro-gun control rally.

But Heil is smart; in between extolling the virtues of motherhood, she's something of an encyclopedia on her country's history and constitution - which also makes her quite frightening. "America would not exist were it not for the gun. The Revolutionary War was won, and the United States of America founded, because individuals took up arms. The founding fathers recognised that and guaranteed us our right to bear arms in the second amendment. This country was born from the gun, and it is the gun that protects our democracy."

No amount of explaining to Heil that King George is dead and that there is no way Tony Blair will ever invade America can convince her the gun is an historical hangover. Fittingly, she lives in a town called New Freedom, Pennsylvania.

And then there's crime. "Ninety per cent of all crimes are carried out with the use of a weapon," she says. When I try to explain that, perhaps, if guns were banned then there would be lower gun crime, Heil responds by telling me her country is different to mine: "We live in a democracy," I'm told. What that means, I'm not sure, but I remind her that King George is definitely dead.

"The gun is the great equaliser," she says, and in my mind's eye I see lots of rich and poor people, black and white, lying on the pavement - all equally dead. "Once you take away the threat to the criminal that he might get killed if he comes near me, it's like putting a sticker on my head saying that he can rape, rob and kill me," she says.

In Texas alone, 16 million people own handguns. Each year more than 30,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds. American culture has one underlying theme - murder, shooting and blood. Isn't her country simply brutal, I ask her.

"That's just what the media shows you," she says, rather lamely.

You learn one thing when talking to the gun lobby folks in America, and that's that they really are through the looking glass. I remind Heil that Britain decided to remove the gun from our culture after horrible crimes such as Hungerford and the Dunblane massacre scarred us as a nation.

"Oh, well, with that Dunblane incident, things might have been different if the teachers had been armed," she says. I can only answer her with silence. "In America, we are now putting up gun exclusion zones around schools. That's like telling criminals to get right into those schools as there is no one in there who can protect themselves."

What about children who shoot themselves dead because hunter- daddy left his handgun lying on the bed? "Well, we are trying to push forward gun education. Children need to learn that guns save lives," Heil says. I half expect her to tell me now how wonderful cancer can be if only we'd open our minds.

On Mother's Day last year, some 5000 Second Amendment Sisters marched through Washington protesting against gun control. "The anti- gun lobby tells us that dozens of children a year are killed by guns. That's lies," she says. "If you take 18 as the age of an adult, then we have 12 kids a day dying of gun shot wounds. But most of these kids are criminals - and they don't count. The real figures show that an average of 44 children aged ten or under die each year from accidental gunshots."

Is that okay, then? I ask her. Is it acceptable that 44 children a year end up dead so she can carry a gun she has never had to use? "Yes" is the answer. I start to get a feeling I'm not in Kansas any more when I ask Heil what guns she owns. "Can't tell you," she says. "You don't divulge your plans to the enemy. If I told you then the criminals would read it and they'd be one step ahead of me." What? Who? Why? The conversation is beginning to make me feel a bit queasy - the way you do when someone who talks to themselves sits beside you on the bus.

Her four children have all been taught to use guns. "We teach our kids the three Rs of firearms," she says. "Respect, responsibility and rights." Then she quotes a scene from the latest Mel Gibson movie The Patriot - set during the War of Independence of course. "In that movie, if he hadn't taught his young boys how to shoot, then they would never have triumphed," she says. Movies ... fantasy ... guns - the founding fathers' foundation stone.

Then Heil tells me that gun owners shouldn't be made to lock their weapons away at home - the pistols and rifles should be out in the open so children (yes, children) can get easy access to them. "Haven't you heard about the kids in California?" she asks conspiratorially. "A naked man wielding a pitchfork broke into their house when their parents were out. The guns had been locked away and the kids couldn't get to them. Two were pitchforked to death."

Now, I've been a crime reporter for many years and believe me, I would have heard of this incident - given that it sounds like the script of Scream 3. In fact, I searched for the story in our news- cuttings service and I'm a little suspicious that Heil may be doling out some urban myths by way of a defence.

I'm at the stage where I'm thinking that this interview can't get any odder when I foolishly ask Heil how she got into guns. Big mistake. I could never have prepared myself for her dadaist answer.

"Just before we were getting married, my husband, Dale, who's a chiropractor, asked me to go deer hunting with him," she says. "I went and he killed some animals and it was fine. But afterwards he told me that it was a test. If I had been squeamish or jumped when he fired the gun, he wouldn't have married me."

Okey dokey. Moving right along, hubby Dale's sicko test is as acceptable to Heil as Susan Millsap's outright subservience to husband Jason. "Men are the head of the household," says a stoic Millsap, another Second Amendment Sister from Iron Station, North Carolina. "They have the right to bear arms."

That argument makes about as much sense as saying men can grow beards so they must be allowed to take four score and ten women as their concubines. Like Heil, Millsap makes no bones about the political baggage that comes with the love of the gun.

"We are Republican, conservative and Christian. We can't accept things like abortion. We oppose gun control. We support the death penalty," says Millsap. While she talks, I'm trying to work out who it is okay to kill. It's bad to kill babies it seems, but it's okay to kill grown-ups. And teenagers seem fair game as well. But what about old people? "Nor can we support euthanasia," Millsap adds. Well, that's the geriatric question answered then.

Susan, her husband, Jason, and their two children, Joshua, ten, and Jacob, 8, are blue-collar America personified. He's a machinist, she's an insurance agent and their children like to pose with guns bigger than their heads for British newspapers. They own 12 rifles and two handguns as well as bows and arrows. I didn't ask why they had bows and arrows, because I really didn't want to know.

Jason Millsap thinks nothing of going to the shops with his wife and children wearing a .44 Ruger pistol in a holster on his hip. He says a few people give him funny looks, but most are "mighty polite", as I would be if an 18-stone American with a gun walked past me. He calls me "Sir" a lot and his wife claims the family needs guns not only to repel King George, should his ghost try to re-take the eastern seaboard, but also to hunt for food if they lose their jobs.

Frankly, I'm not shocked by this. I'm now prepared to hear anything by way of a justification for the carrying of weapons. I'm told that her husband is quite proficient at killing squirrels and should the couple ever become unemployed their skill with the rifle will indeed feed the family. Now I see the local Ford motor plant shut down and Ma Millsap is there, in my mind's eye, smugly stirring a huge cauldron of roadkill and rodent for the little 'uns' supper while the families who voted for Al Gore starve to death all around her.

Millsap has got a bit of a bee in her bonnet about not being able to carry a concealed weapon to work. "I'm not the type who will have a row with my boss and then go and pull out a gun and start killing everyone," she explains. And that is it. That is the point where I just give up. When a society has reduced itself to the point where individual members feel it is necessary to explain to you they aren't serial killers then there is really no point in bothering with that society any more.

I can only ask her why. Why is it that her family feels the need to own more guns than the entire Irish army? "It is a man's job to protect the house and his family," she says. "That's the way it is in the bible. If my husband isn't there then he must feel that I'm capable of protecting myself and my children. And if I'm not there then my children need to know how to look after themselves. That is why we all need to know how to use a gun.

"We have a gun by the bed, one by the back door, one in drawer in the living room and a gun cabinet filled with rifles as well. We are protected."

I tell her this all sounds very frightening. She gets a little mumsy and says: "Well, Neil, I suppose if you want to imagine that taking the gun out of America is a good thing, then you go right on ahead and imagine it. But it won't ever be removed from American society. When the criminals have a bigger gun than the police why am I going to settle for an empty holster?

"In America we are born with the right to think that as long as we don't hurt other people then we can do just what we want. We are free. But if you tell me how many guns I can have or which animals I can and can't shoot, are you going to be telling me next how many children I can have? If there was a President who arrived in office and wanted to take away our right to own a gun there would be an uprising."

Maria Heil agrees. To her, the second amendment is a tool that can be used to turn on government. "The second amendment is there in case anyone tries to abuse my rights and liberties," she says. "It is the backbone of the entire constitution. If the government tried to take away my right to bear arms then I would be entitled to take up arms against that government, according to my constitutional rights."

I have a strange feeling of deja vu here. Like Waco, I ask her, referring to David Koresh and his Christian cult members who went head to head with the Federal authorities over the vast array of arms at their Texas headquarters and ended up dying amid blazing buildings at the end of a gun battle with the FBI.

"Yes, just like that," says Heil. "The government acted illegally in Waco. They could have handled it differently. Hopefully, our new President will try to get to the lies and deceit at the heart of that case."

With no little trepidation, I ask Heil if she has ever killed anything. "Yeah, I killed a groundhog before," she says. "I was pregnant with my second child and the groundhog had dug a huge hole in our garden which I slipped down into. I could have broken my leg, or lost my baby, or one of my other children might have slipped in and broke their neck.

"So I got a gun and shot the first groundhog I saw. I was protecting my family." Did you feel bad, I ask. "Nope. All I felt was that I hoped that sucker was dead." Couldn't you have just filled in the hole? "Nope." Obviously not. Why use a spade when you've got a .45 Magnum?

I'm about to quote the bible to her as this seems an apt point to introduce the concept of swords being turned into ploughshares. Then I realise that she is a woman of God and decide otherwise Guns: the grim facts l In America in 1998 a total of 30,708 people were killed by guns. Of these:

17,424 were gun suicides 12,102 were gun homicides 886 were accidental shootingsl A total of 3792 young people ages 0-19 were killed by gunfire in the US that year - or ten kids a year. Of these:

2215 were murdered 1241 committed suicide 262 died from an unintentional or accidental shooting l Firearm injuries are the second leading cause of injury and death for all ages and for young people aged 15-24. Motor vehicle injuries were the leading cause of injury and death.

l Guns were used in seven out of every ten murders in the US in 1997. Handguns were used in 53 per cent of all murders and in 78 per cent of all murders committed with a firearm. That's 26.4 times the gun crime rate of Scotland, and 34.7 times that of England and Wales.

l In 1998, gun makers manufactured 3,724,546 guns in the United States.

l With a population of 270 million, a quarter of adults in the United States owns a gun.

l The risk of suicide or homicide is twice as high for individuals with a family history of registered handgun purchase, than for those without such a history.

l Suicide is nearly five times more likely to occur in a household with a gun than in a household without a gun.

l The presence of a gun in the home triples the risk of homicide in the home.

Copyright 2001
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