By Nick O'Malley
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Rindge, New Hampshire: Richard Feldman has a broad smile, a welcoming manner, an easy conversational tone and an arsenal of about 140 guns, which a government, if it wanted to take them, might indeed need to prise from his cold dead hands.
He is at once a Second Amendment true believer and a National Rifle Association apostate.
A couple of weeks after the Charleston church massacre - the shooting of a black pastor and eight congregants by a young white racist in South Carolina - we met at his home in rural New Hampshire to talk about the place of guns in US politics and culture, and the power of the American gun lobby.
We had been speaking on-and-off since 2012, after the massacre of 20 primary school children and six staff in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. He has insight about the things the NRA, America's most powerful lobby group, believes but will not say.
Richard Feldman at his home in Rindge, New Hampshire with his dogs Stanley and Stella and a version of the TEC-9.Credit: Trevor Collens
Feldman is a former cop who after law school and a stint working for the Reagan administration went to work for the NRA as a lobbyist. Later he went on to lobby directly for gun manufacturers.
In that role, he says, he had a hand in crafting the legal tactics that the industry and the NRA used to white-ant and eventually destroy the federal government ban on assault rifles that expired in 2004.
Feldman was excommunicated from the NRA for daring to back a Clinton administration initiative to ship new guns with trigger locks, in the hope of reducing accidental shootings.
Despite this apostasy, he remains in lockstep with the NRA on most issues.
A New Hampshire licence plate featuring the state motto "Live Free or Die" in Rindge, New Hampshire.Credit: Trevor Collens
We sit on wicker chairs on the veranda of his cabin as his two dogs - Stanley and Stella - compete for space on his lap and he shows me over a couple of guns.
One is a TEC-9, a mean-looking pistol with a long magazine.
The exhibition floor of the 144th National Rifle Association Annual Meetings and Exhibits in Nashville, Tennessee in April.Credit: Bloomberg
It is technically a big semi-automatic handgun - it fires one round each time you pull the trigger. Its cousin is a Swedish submachine gun that sprays bullets on full auto when you depress the trigger.
During the crack cocaine wars of the 1980s and 1990s, this gun became popular among gangs partly because it carried 32 rounds in its standard-issue magazine, partly because it was so cheap and simple to use, partly because it looked identical to its machine-gun cousin.
Richard Feldman with a Glock .45 calibre pistol, one of more than 100 guns he owns.Credit: Trevor Collens
The TEC-9 was so distinctive it practically had its own role in the TV show Miami Vice, and after a mass shooting in Cleveland in 1989 politicians sought to restrict it in various jurisdictions, including Washington, DC, where a law was passed to make distributors liable for the deaths and injuries it caused.
This was where Feldman came into the story. Having read the law, he saw it was preposterously easy to circumvent.
Dylann Roof, charged with carrying out the Charleston church massacre, poses with a Confederate flag and a Glock pistol in this photo with a digital timestamp of April 27, 2015.
As with the later federal attempts to ban assault rifles, the law sought to do two things - identify the guns the politicians wanted to target by name, and identify characteristics of similar weapons that should also fall under such legislation.
These tended to be the bits that made the guns look like military weapons - black metal rather than wooden stocks, flash suppressors on the muzzle, magazines that sat forward of the trigger.
A woman mourns while speaking on the phone near Sandy Hook Elementary School, after the December 2012 shooting there which left 20 children and six school staff dead.Credit: Reuters
But the laws were so poorly drafted that Feldman told his client all they had to do was make minor cosmetic changes to sidestep them.
In the case of the TEC-9, it was even simpler; they just had to change the name. The TEC-9 model Feldman shows me became the TEC-DC9 - named, meanly, after David Clarke, the civil rights leader and city councilman who had written the law trying to restrict its use in the first place.
National Rifle Association members applaud during their annual meeting, held in Nashville in April.Credit: AP
This re-badging was enough to render the gun legal - and this is the point Feldman is trying to make.
"If those who proposed banning different guns actually understood what they were talking about, they might have proved far more dangerous to my side," he says.
Malana Pinckney, daughter of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, is hugged by her mother Jennifer at her father's funeral in Charleston, South Carolina on June 26.Credit: Reuters
"They don't get it. And the reason politically that gun owners have so much power is because gun owners care about the guns they own or want to own.
"People can easily say, 'Gee I think we ought to ban this gun, I don't own one, it doesn't affect me, my ox is not being gored.'
A boy is shown how to sight down an electronic rifle during the National Rifle Association's annual meeting in Nashville.Credit: Reuters
"That is the key to understanding so much of the gun issue - who is being affected by it? And who just has an opinion?"
A gun owner, particularly one invested in Second Amendment politics, can be relied upon not only to understand the laws, Feldman explains, but to go to the polls and vote on them.
Connecticut State Police lead a line of escaping children from the Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.Credit: AP
This matter of simply showing up is crucial in the US, where voting is not compulsory. Further, he explains, someone who supports the Second Amendment is far more likely to vote on it as a single issue, while those who support some restrictions, such as the hugely popular idea of universal background checks, are likely to be considering a range of issues while in the polling booth - anything from education to foreign policy.
"You get people to respond to threats far more effectively," says Feldman.
Richard Feldman with a shotgun.Credit: Trevor Collens
This understanding helps explain the NRA's reactions after both the Sandy Hook massacre and the Charleston massacre
As the US reeled after Sandy Hook, the NRA went into its customary post-bloodshed media blackout. Then one week after the shooting and four days before Christmas, its executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, fronted a press conference in Washington, DC.
Even to the Americans in the audience, it was a shocking speech to watch.
Rather than conceding that the availability of the arsenal that the killer used might have contributed to the carnage, LaPierre went on the offensive, lamenting the dangers of so-called "gun-free zones", like schools and bars and universities and churches and airports.
If only the teachers had been armed, he said.
Then he played to fear.
"How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall attention and a sense of identity that they crave, while provoking others to try to make their mark," he said.
With this shot fired across the bow of Congress, the movement toward regulation stalled. It was clear that the NRA and its 5 million members - and its mailing list - would be turned on any representative who failed to toe the line.
Vague and fluffy proposed regulations were voted down by representatives who scurried off the floor as parents of the dead wept in the galleries.
The perils of moderation
The NRA used similar rhetoric after the killings in Charleston.
Because he had earlier voted against NRA-backed proposals to make it easier to carry guns in public, an NRA board member blamed the slain pastor of the stricken church - South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney - for the killings.
"Something else to consider: The pastor of this church, who was killed, is a State Legislator in SC," wrote the board member, Charles Cotton, in an internet forum.
"And he voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead."
Cotton had learned what LaPierre had learned – there is no political upside for the NRA in showing any restraint.
The NRA is driven to the extreme by political realities: voters are far more easily motivated by fear than debate or moderation.
If it does not advocate an absolute and unrestricted vision of the Second Amendment, other lobby groups will erupt on its right, says Feldman, drawing away membership and fees - and political power.
Many groups already have. The Gun Owners of America, which bills itself as "The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington", now claims 300,000 members.
This fear is reflected inside the NRA too, where LaPierre must adopt and defend the most extreme positions to ensure his own.
Sometimes the tensions of this endless drive to the extremes sneaks into public view, such as when an NRA official chastised the members of a group calling itself "Open Carry Texas" as being "outright weird".
Open Carry Texas had been expressing its right to bear arms by gathering in groups in suburban malls carrying assault rifles, in a bid to acclimatise the public to the sight of people demonstrating their gun rights.
A day after issuing a statement suggesting that "it's downright weird and certainly not a practical way to go normally about your business while being prepared to defend yourself", the NRA recanted, saying the statement had been issued in error by a staffer.
Guns as identity
Back on his veranda, Feldman shows me another gun.
"This is a Glock .45 calibre pistol," he says, in the manner of an instructor. "This is actually the very model that the shooter used in Charleston, South Carolina, to kill an awful lot of people in a terrible, horrible incident."
Then he turns the Glock on its side to show off an engraving on the slide. I can't make it out, but he explains that it is a representation of the massive rock sculpture on Stone Mountain.
Stone Mountain is a cliff face in Georgia upon which a gigantic image has been carved of three heroes of the Confederate States of America: the generals Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis.
It is a near-sacred site to the Ku Klux Klan.
This is not why Feldman owns the gun, nor does he have any particular affinity to the South or its memorials, but given that we have met to discuss guns after a mass killing of blacks by a white racist who draped himself in Confederate symbols, it is a little chilling to me.
And pertinent too.
Guns in America, Feldman explains, are not just tools to shoot. They are symbols, just like the Confederate flag that the South Carolina state house voted to remove from its grounds on Thursday afternoon in response to the massacre.
And because guns are both physical and temporal, because they emphasise notions of identity as well as physical power, gun policy excites a visceral response in America.
A pro-gun guy, says Feldman, looks at a gun and sees freedom and independence and a link to the very heart of the nation: "[George] Washington didn't say … 'let's got to Boston and hold a protest', he said 'let's go and shoot the British'."
And then he asks me if just on that one day, and he repeats the phrase and reaches out his hand to emphasise the moment - just on that one day in Sandy Hook - would I not have preferred the teachers were armed?
And I think of my oldest, a fine-limbed boy with an Australian passport and an American accent who'll soon be old enough for primary school, and I tell him I would prefer that the killer didn't have an assault rifle.
He pauses and we smile, acknowledging the gulf between us. Later he'll give me lemon soda and mow his big New Hampshire lawn with his wife as I wait for a lift.