KEY POINTS:
Shirley Katz is not afraid to fight for her rights. Last week the schoolteacher, 44, went to court in her home town of Medford, Oregon, to protest at her working conditions. Specifically she is outraged she cannot carry a handgun into class. "I know it is my right to carry that gun," she said.
Katz was in court in the week someone else took a gun to school in America. Asa Coon, 14, walked the corridors of his school in Cleveland Ohio, a gun in each hand, shooting two teachers and two students. Then he killed himself. Coon's attempted massacre made headlines.
But a more bloody rampage, the murder of six young partygoers by policeman Tyler Peterson in Crandon, Wisconsin, got less attention, even in the New York Times - America's newspaper of record - which buried it deep inside the paper.
Guns, and the violence their owners inflict, have never been more prevalent in America. Gun crime has risen steeply over the past three years. Although groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) consistently claim gun-owners are being victimised, there have probably never been so many guns or owners in America - although no one can be sure, as no reliable count is kept. One federal study estimated there were 215 million guns, and that about half of all US households owned one.
Such a number makes America's gun culture thoroughly mainstream.
An average of almost eight people aged under 19 are shot dead in America every day. In 2005 there were more than 14,000 gun murders in the US; 400 of the victims were children. There are 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents in an average year. Since the killing of John F. Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than have perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century.
Studies show that having a gun at home makes it six times more likely that an abused woman will be murdered. A gun in a US home is 22 times more likely to be used in an accidental shooting, a murder or a suicide than in self-defence against an attack.
Yet despite those figures, US gun culture is not retreating. It is growing. Take Katz' case in Oregon. She brought her cause to court under a state law that gives licensed gun-owners the right to bring a firearm to work. Her school is her workplace. Such a debate would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Now it is the battleground.
"Who would have thought a few years ago, we would even be having this conversation? But this won't stop here,' said Professor Brian Anse Patrick of the University of Toledo in Ohio. Needless to say, last week the judge sided with Katz and she won the first round.
America is a nation awash with guns, from the suburbs to the inner cities, from the Midwest's farms to Manhattan's mansions. Gun-owning groups have been so successful in their cause that it no longer even seems strange to many Americans that Katz should want to go armed into an English class.
To look at the photographs in Kyle Cassidy's book Armed America is to glimpse a surreal world. Or at least it seems that way to many non-Americans. Cassidy spent two years taking portraits of gun owners and their weapons across the US.
The result is a disturbing tableau of happy families, often with pets and toddlers, posing with pistols, assault rifles and the sort of heavy machine-guns usually associated with war zones."By the end, I had seen so many guns and I knew so much about guns that it no longer seemed unusual," Cassidy said. He keeps his weapon in a gun safe in his home in Philadelphia. "This turned into a project not about guns but about a diverse group of people," he said.
At the cutting edge of weapon culture remains the gun lobby and its most vocal advocate, the NRA. Founded in the 19th century by ex-Civil War army officers dismayed at their troops' lack of marksmanship, the NRA has become the most effective lobbying group in Washington DC
In 2000, Vice-President Al Gore supported stricter background checks for gun-buyers and the NRA organised against him, describing the election as the most important since the Civil War. It spent US$20 million against Gore in an election which ended in a razor's edge result. The NRA's influence was especially felt in Gore's home state of Tennessee, which he narrowly lost.
Democrats have learnt that lesson, and many shy away from gun control issues. In last year's mid-term elections the NRA was able to back an unprecedented 58 Democrats running for office. Every one of them won.
Such influence over the past 30 years has enabled the NRA to fight a successful campaign against new gun laws. It has loosened regulations, spreading the ability to legally carry concealed weapons in 39 states.
But the key question is not about the number of guns in America; it is about why people are armed. For many gun-owners, and a few sociologists, the answer lies in America's past. The frontier society, they say, was populated by gun-wielding settlers who used weapons to feed their families and ward off hostile bandits and Indians. America was thus born with a gun in its hand. Unfortunately much of this history is simply myth. The vast majority of settlers were farmers, not fighters. The task of killing Indians was left to the military and - most effectively - European diseases. Guns in colonial times were much rarer than often thought, not least because they were so expensive that few settlers could afford them.
One study of early gun homicides showed that a musket was as likely to be used as club to beat someone to death as it was to have been fired.
But many Americans believe the myth. The role of the gun is now enshrined in mass popular culture and has huge patriotic significance.
Hence, gun ownership is still a constitutional right, in case America is invaded and needs to form a popular militia (as hard as that event might be to imagine). It also explains why guns are so prevalent in Hollywood. Now playing is the Jodie Foster film The Brave One, a classic vigilante movie of the wronged woman turning to the power of the pistol to murder the criminals who killed her boyfriend.
Foster's character is played as undeniably heroic."There is a fascination with guns in our culture. All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun," said Cassidy.
But this worship of the gun in many ways springs from economic and social problems. It took mass production and mass marketing to popularise firearms. The Civil War brought an explosion in mass arms manufacturing in America - during the war, more than 200,000 Colt .44 pistols alone were made. Guns became familiar and cheaper for millions of Americans.
In later 19th century, gun companies started using marketing techniques to sell their weapons, often invoking invented frontier imagery. That continues today. More than 2000 gun shows are held each year.
It is big business, and business needs to sell more and more to keep itself profitable. "They will do anything to sell guns," says Joan Burbick, author of the book Gun Show Nation.
There are deeper issues. The gun lobby's main argument is that guns protect their owners. They deter criminals and attackers who - the gun lobby points out helpfully - are often armed themselves. Some surveys say there are more than two million "defensive" uses of firearms each year. But critics say this argument is a shield, using guns to deflect harder arguments about how crime is caused by economics, poverty and racism.
"The argument over guns redefines a lot of social issues as simple aspects of crime," said Burbick. She believes that a way to make Americans feel safer from crime is not to arm them, but to tackle the causes of crime. "We have to take back the language of human security. To talk about solving those social issues in terms of safety, not just letting the gun lobby control that language."
It is a powerful argument. Critics of America's gun culture often point to other nations with high levels of gun ownership but much lower levels of violent crime. The fact is that America itself is equally divided. Patrick, a liberal who owns a gun, lives in a quiet, rural part of Michigan just across the state line from Ohio and the town of Toledo where he works. "I would be amazed if anyone within four miles of me did not have a gun," he said. "But our homicide rate is zero."
Then look at where Cassidy lives. He has an apartment in Philadelphia, a city as flooded with guns as Patrick's rural idyll, but also with inner-city social ills. It has a stratospheric murder rate. "There is a murder here every day. This is something that America has to come to terms with," he said.
Yet the differences do not lie with the simple existence of guns. Both places are full of them. They lie with the root causes of crime and violence, such as poverty and drugs, that blight many big cities. Guns seem neither to be totally the problem and certainly not the solution.
But that is a debate few in America are having. In the meantime, the gun culture is so firmly entrenched and society so full of guns that there is little prospect of it retreating. Even those who advocate much tighter laws have long accepted defeat of the ideal of creating a society where guns are rare in public life, or even completely absent. "That notion is absurd," said Patrick. "There is no way to de-gun America."
To cap a grim week, as Katz was winning her court battle in Oregon police in Pennsylvania were giving details of a raid on the home of a teenager who was plotting to attack a school. They found seven home-made grenades and an assault rifle. His mother bought it for him at a gun show. He was 14.
- Observer
DEATH TOLL
Virginia Tech
Seung-Hui Cho, a Korean American, was a loner who scared classmates. In April he killed 32 students and staff, then himself, at Virginia Tech. It was the worst US school shooting.
Amish killings
On a Monday morning in October last year, truck driver Charles Roberts opened fire in a school in Paradise, Pennsylvania. He killed five children, then shot himself.
Columbine
Colorado misfits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a rampage at their high school, Columbine, in April 1999, killing 12 students and a teacher. They then committed suicide.
Luby's massacre
In October 1991, George Hennard drove a truck into Luby's Cafe in Killeen, Texas, shot dead 23 people and injured a further 20 before shooting himself.
'Going postal'
Patrick Sherrill, an Oklahoma postal employee, took a gun to work in August 1986, shot 14 staff, then killed himself.
McDonald's massacre
In January 1984 in San Ysidro, California, James Huberty killed 21 people with an Uzi and other guns at a McDonald's. He was killed by a police sniper.
Texas tower shooting
In 1966 Charles Whitman murdered his wife and mother, then climbed a University of Texas observation tower in Austin. He shot and killed 14 people before police shot him.
