Of God and Guns - Obama takes on Nevada

At Gun World and Archery on the outskirts of Elko, Farnes Williams is talking politics. At the same time, he brandishes an assault rifle of the sort John Rambo might use to single-handedly take out a Burmese military base. The weapon, he says, lies at the heart of the 2008 presidential election.

"The military call this an M16 assault rifle, but round here we call it a sporting firearm," he says. "It's used for shooting squirrels, rabbits or coyotes. But you could kill some two-legged critter with it if you wanted. So if Barack Obama wins, it'll be one of the first to get banned."

Mr Williams does not need a sign in his window telling customers to vote Republican; most of them already do. In this remote region of Nevada's high desert, where three out of four adults own firearms and weekends are spent hunting in the nearby Ruby Mountains, the right to bear arms is not so much a political issue as a local obsession.

Gun enthusiasts are not the only Republican-leaning lobby in Elko, either. The region's major industry is mining, which pays the wages of roughly one in four working adults. Mike McKenzie, the operations manager of Elko's Gold County Mining Company, says they have a healthy dislike of environmentalists and their left-leaning friends in Washington. "A lot of our work's on public land, and if Obama wins, he'll tax us more for using it. John McCain comes from a different place on environmentalism, and he's open about drilling for oil offshore. So that makes him fine by me."