‘You don’t take away my tools’: The Texan gun owners who fear Kamala is coming for them
Ten Texans pick up their pistols. Each loads a magazine, pulls the slide back and aims their weapon at the chest of the man-sized silhouette 10 feet in front of them.
"Check that grip," barks Michael Cargill, the range instructor and owner of Central Texas Gun Works in Austin. "Extend your arms. Look at your front sight. Look at your front sight. Look at your rear sight. Two shots. Fire!"
The students on this "Licence to Carry" course are a cross-section of America: an older white couple, two black women, two Hispanic women, two Asian men and a white man. Mr Cargill himself is an amiable black, gay Army veteran and former Democrat. Anyone looking here for a cowboy stereotype would be disappointed.
Mr Cargill, 55, is always ready with a cheery quip. When it comes to self-defence and the right to bear arms enshrined in the US Constitution's Second Amendment, however, he is deadly serious — and he is not convinced Kamala Harris feels the same way.
Ms Harris, the Democratic nominee, recently announced she was a gun owner and laughed as she told Oprah Winfrey: "If somebody breaks into my house they're getting shot."
She later revealed that she owned a Glock pistol. A video of her talking about the Glock, which her campaign circulated in an attempt to woo centrist voters, has been viewed over 14 million times on TikTok.
After the range session, Mr Cargill reflected on the possibility of a black woman winning the White House. "It's well overdue," he said. "It's time for a female to be president of the United States. I don't have a problem with that. But I stick to the politics of it."
Ms Harris's gun talk is "a bunch of hot tooey", he contended. "She knows that you can't prove it and she doesn't have to show it. I don't think she actually has one. The Secret Service wouldn't let her. Their job is to protect her, even from herself."
Mr Cargill will vote for Donald Trump : "I vote my pocketbook and I vote my safety."
Around 42 per cent of Americans own a gun and there are more than a million firearms in Texas alone. Although gun control measures are broadly popular, Democrats fret about alienating gun owners in swing states.
In 2000, Al Gore is widely believed to have lost his home state of Tennessee, and the presidency, because of his anti-gun stance against George W Bush, a Texan.
Mr Cargill is a gun owner, activist, dealer and Second Amendment purist. He began carrying a gun when his grandmother, who raised him, was attacked and raped in Florida. "The fact that she was in such distress and that I was not there to help her, that taught me that I need to make sure that does not happen to any other lady," he said.
In June, he won a Supreme Court ruling against Merrick Garland, president Joe Biden's attorney general, over the use of bump stocks, a device that hooks onto a rifle's stock , held against the shoulder, and uses the energy from the recoil to bump the trigger against the shooter's finger so the weapon fires faster.
Bump stocks were banned by Trump in 2018 after the Las Vegas mass shooting — the deadliest in American history — in which Stephen Paddock, 64, killed 60 concertgoers and wounded 413 when he fired more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition in 11 minutes. Investigators found a dozen rifles fitted with bump stocks in his hotel suite.
Mr Cargill deeply resented having to hand over his bump stocks. "I felt raped, assaulted," he said. The government, he believed, had no authority to take away something he had bought legally. "You don't take away my tools for me, because I had nothing to do with [Las Vegas]. I felt abused, and so that's why I stood up and decided to fight."
He now once again sells bump stocks from $349, some of them engraved with "Michael Cargill vs. U.S" and the date of the Supreme Court ruling in Roman numerals.
Mr Cargill was disappointed that it was Trump who banned bump stocks, but views that as an aberration. He is convinced that Ms Harris and her vice-presidential running mate governor Tim Walz of Minnesota — a shotgun owner and hunter —are "gun grabbers".
"Tim Walz and I are both gun owners," Ms Harris said during the recent presidential debate. "We're not taking anybody's guns away." But she has vowed to introduce a ban on "assault weapons" such as the AR-15, which have been used in many school shootings, and she previously advocated a compulsory gun "buyback" program.
"If you do anything that looks like it's going to trample over the Second Amendment rights, then I'm going to be there and put my foot on your throat," Mr Cargill said.
School shootings such as the one in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, in which 22 were killed, and in Winder, Georgia, this year when a boy of 14 killed four, have intensified the focus on protecting schoolchildren.
Republicans have focused on changing laws to allow school staff to carry guns and there are programs to train teachers and others in the use of firearms so a school shooter can be killed before police arrive, by which time there might be many dead.
Charles Heller, a gun rights activist in Tucson, Arizona, was involved in setting up a program called FASTER. "We have an angel donor and we can make it free for any teacher, school administrator or janitor who wants to go armed, lawfully, in our schools, to take the training.
"It's not just about guns, it's about first aid and communications with arriving law enforcement."
Mr Heller said that Ms Harris on guns reminded him of a sailboat "tacking to catch the prevailing wind, just as her accent seems to change with the region that she's visiting".
If elected, he said, Ms Harris would "do anything and everything to impede the possession of and use of firearms" for ordinary Americans.
"She'll continue to make it more and more difficult for anybody to either have a gun or, if not, interfere with using it, restrict the types of guns you can have, the number of guns you can have, and the purchase of ammunition, without which the gun is just a doorstop."
Back at the range in Austin, Mr Cargill directed his 10 students to put their guns back in their cases. "All right, let's take a look at our targets," he said, looking at the silhouettes, most of which showed a tight grouping of bullet holes in the centre mass. "Good job."
He smiled contentedly at the day's 100 per cent pass rate. "Shooting is an easy concept if people just listen," he said.
