RICHARD PARKER has a problem with his 50-calibre sniper's rifle, but firepower isn't it. Made by Hampshire-based company Accuracy International, the rifle's cigar-sized bullet reputedly slams into distant targets with more force than Dirty Harry's famous .44 Magnum at point-blank range.

"With the right ammunition," muses Parker, an amiable 57-year-old marketing executive from Indiana, "you can take out a tank." Accuracy isn't the problem either: Parker can hit a skull-sized target at 2000 yards.

No, his problem is this: where do you fire a weapon of such heart-stopping power and range that American gun-control advocates believe it poses a serious threat to post-9/11 national security? Answer: Knob Creek Range in Kentucky, home to world's largest machine-gun show, a three-day blast-fest which is - outside of actual combat - an unrivalled display of the deadliest firearms ever made.

Knob Creek is in a place called - appropriately enough - Bullitt County. A former munitions test-site tucked into a cleft in the hills, its main range is about 300 metres long and is littered with old cars, boats, refrigerators, cookers, washing machines and gas cylinders. None of these targets last long under the withering gunfire unleashed by dozens of shooters in 30-minute bursts. "Ready on the left?" announces the shoot director over the PA system. "Ready on the right? Okay, let's rock and roll!"

For the uninitiated, what you hear next is a crashing wall of noise, unendurable without ear-protection. Only an expert can isolate and savour the snap and crackle of specific weapons: Gatling, Thompson, Browning, Heckler & Koch, Sten, Uzi, M16, AK47. Then there's the mini-gun, with its six whirring barrels firing up to 6000 rounds a minute. It vomits out bullet-casings, and is painfully loud: imagine someone slowly cutting your ears off with an unmuffled chainsaw.

Stacked high on tables behind the shooters are boxes and clips of live ammunition, including tracer and armour-piercing rounds. On Friday, during a break in the shooting, spectators are allowed into the range to stroll dumbstruck amid colandered fridges and cookers. Some form a reverential huddle around a burnt-out, bullet-peppered Ford Lexington. Many spectators will try out the weapons themselves. An M249 light machine gun - known as an Iraqi Street Sweeper' by American soldiers - costs more than a buck a bullet to fire. The mini-gun is $650 for 1200 rounds, the most expensive 12 seconds of your life.

For American gun-lovers, Knob Creek is a high-decibel declaration of their constitutional right to bear arms, including modern military weapons with a killing potential unimagined by the Second Amendment's 18th-century authors. While only a tiny percentage of gun-owners have such high-powered firearms, the entire community tends to support them, fearful that any legislation passed to outlaw machine guns might eventually be used against hand-guns and hunting rifles. Gun-control is another divisive issue in a nation already deeply polarised by Bush's Iraq misadventure and ultra-conservative policies.

Richard Parker is here with his brother Bill, 54, a big guy in a grubby white T-shirt. They call themselves the Boom Brothers.

The Boom Brothers' private arsenal is entirely legal and includes: three belt-fed Browning machine guns; a Colt M4 carbine used by US Special Forces for close-quarters combat; two Colt AR15s assault rifles, cousins of the ubiquitous M16; four large-calibre sniper's rifles, one fitted with a silencer; and a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, often featured in action movies and video games. Back in the trailer they've also left a futuristic-looking Bushmaster rifle, a Browning Automatic Rifle, a fully automatic Uzi, and some AK47s.

"We've got a bunch of pistols, too," remembers Richard, "but I won't get into that." All told, the weapons are worth more than half a million dollars. But Richard vows, "We'll never trade or get rid of any of them."

"They're like our little children," says Bill.

Bill is a private investigator who lives on a Caribbean island. While Knob Creek attracts both serving and retired soldiers, plus its fair share of freaks, video-game geeks, rednecks and militiamen, this is an expensive hobby and many shooters are doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals. It usually takes Bill Parker hours to get his machine guns checked through US airports, but only because they fascinate the security staff, who are often former cops or soldiers. "Americans have a love affair with guns," he explains.

And what about the ammunition - how does he transport that? "I ship it by UPS," says Bill. Over the three-day shoot, the Boom Brothers will fire tens of thousands of rounds, worth thousands of dollars. "Our record is about 40,000 rounds," grins Richard.

So how does your average, law-abiding American get his hands on a machine gun? The hardest part is a three to six-month raft of background checks, finger-printing and paperwork involving local police, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Actually finding a licensed machine gun to buy is easy. Their production for civilian use was stopped in 1986, but semi-automatic versions of the same machine guns were still manufactured until 1994, when Bill Clinton signed a 10-year federal ban on certain assault weapons.

The ban didn't amount to much. Civilians were still allowed to possess or transfer millions of assault weapons which were legally manufactured or owned before the law was passed. Also, slightly adapted versions of banned firearms could still be legally manufactured, and millions were. Despite the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, Congress allowed the ban to expire. The anti-gun lobby will argue that the Bush administration has put assault weapons back on the streets. The truth is, they never really left them.

Richard Parker seems unmoved by the debate. "Guns are politically incorrect," he admits. "The people I hang around with in business circles think this is crazy, awful." So why do it? "Because big, powerful guns are a lot of fun to shoot," shrugs Richard.

A sign at Knob Creek's gate declares, "We Support Our President And Our Troops". This is a country at war, as the T-shirts people wear also remind you. One shooter's shirt has a cartoon of an Arab wearing a head bandage and the legend, "I Support Iraqi Prisoner Abuse".

A shooter called Doug Ferguson is selling T-shirts which are "a little" politically incorrect, he admits. "I made them for some friends serving overseas." The front of the T-shirt reads "Baghdad Tobacco Company" and the back - beneath a sketch of a bullet-riddled Iraqi - "Any time's a good time to smoke a raghead. Fire one up today".

Ferguson is a trim, muscular Virginian with ultra-alert eyes - Special Forces, possibly, although he won't reveal his profession. "I do different things," he fudges. "Whatever pays the bills."

"Are you military?" I ask.

"Ex-military," he says.

"Can you be more specific?"

"No."

There is more military paraphernalia for sale at Knob Creek's busy market - and plenty of firearms. A 1918 Maxim gun, made by MAN Nürnberg costs $12,000; a rare Uzi, $99,000. You can also buy a Latvian military-issue nuclear, biological and chemical protection mask; coffee mugs bearing portraits of Hitler, Himmler and Eva Braun; guides to making bombs in your basement and napalm in your bath-tub; and a camouflage bra-and-panties set for the wife.

Another stall sells bumper stickers. "The easiest way to a woman's heart is through the ribcage," says one. "If it weren't for the flashbacks," reads another, "I'd have no memory at all."

"I'm looking for one that says, Register Commies, Not Firearms,'" says Ralph Passonno, an auctioneer from New York state. Passonno grew up with guns. "My daddy gave me my first gun when I was four years old," he recalls proudly. Now the owner of a Colt AR15 semi-automatic, Passonno is a plump, jovial man with a white beard. He's like Santa Claus, but better armed.

"Guns prevent crime," he believes, even though his business partner was shot dead by an armed assailant back in 1981, and Passonno himself badly injured.

Passonno is candid and likable, and worried that his opinions might sound "a bit crazy." In truth, they do, yet they are doubtless shared by many Americans at Knob Creek and beyond. He believes liberalism is a "mental disorder", that tiny computer chips are being inserted into our shoes to track our movements, and that the United Nations and European Union are part of a "One World Government" bent on enslaving Americans and other freedom-loving peoples. He believes the US Patriot Act is an outrage. "You know," he whispers, "that in this country federal agents can now go into our homes without a warrant, take items, and not even tell us they were in there and took them?"

Passonno hates the feds. But he loathes the French. "We've done a lot for them," he says. "They've done nothing for us. They hate us." (A fellow Knob Creeker wears a T-shirt showing a French soldier "saluting" - that is, raising both hands above his head.) But Passonno likes Germans, because he believes they only opposed the Iraq war due to brainwashing by a socialist government and a liberal media. Also, Germans make nice guns. "High-precision, very reliable, top quality," he says. Also, his wife is Bavarian.

At night, like most Knob Creekers, I camp in a nearby field. My neighbour is clad in combat fatigues and called Jim. "An armed America is a polite America," says Jim, who is very polite indeed: he owns a bunch of firearms. "If they ever tried to take 'em away," he vows, almost inaudibly, "there'd be a lot of dead people, and I'd be one of 'em." Jim is the tall, quiet, psychotic type, and when he invites you to share a beer around his campfire, you say yes.

Day two, Saturday, and thousands of people are arriving. They arrive in gas-guzzling SUVs and hell-yeah Humvees bearing American flags and Bush-Cheney stickers; they arrive on Harleys and quads-bikes and great lumbering motorhomes. Absolutely nobody arrives in a Citröen.

The happiest man at Knob Creek is Jeff Gilland. He is the local recruiter for the National Rifle Association (NRA), and this weekend will sign up dozens of new members. "I do well," admits Gilland, 49, a former US Airforce guard who now works at a Jim Beam whiskey factory. "I'm not a high-pressure salesman by any means. I just give them a few facts to think about."

Like the NRA's oft-heard but unproven claim that crime decreases in states where carrying concealed weapons is legal. Or that new gun legislation only serves to distract from the state's miserable record in catching real law-breakers. "Criminals don't obey gun laws," insists Gilland. "If you pass them, you only affect honest people."

Joining the NRA is not just sensible, he continues, but downright patriotic. "The NRA does similar things on the homefront that our military does all around the world: protect freedom," says Gilland. "I hated to see fox-hunting banned in England. That's just as much a tradition for a lot of you folks as the right to carry arms is in this country."

Gilland's arguments are faithfully echoed by other Knob Creekers. "Carrying a camera doesn't necessarily make you a pornographer," Gene Seissiger, an instructor visiting from a Florida shooting school, tells our photographer Philip Blenkinsop. (Nor - as people around here like to say - did a spoon make Rosie O'Donnell fat.) Seissiger's favourite weapon is a Sterling 9mm: British-made, ultra-reliable, deadly accurate over 100 meters.

"It also performs well in deserts," he continues, "which is why a lot of them are now used in Iraq."

"By the Americans?" I ask.

"No," says Seissiger, "by the Iraqis."

Dusk approaches. Thousands of spectators have gathered for the night shoot, Knob Creek's spectacular central event. First, however, the shooters lay down their smoking weapons while a preacher delivers a long, fiery sermon over the public address system.

America's freedoms have been secured by "generations of spilled blood, soaked on battlefields worldwide," the preacher reminds the silent crowd. "You, and you alone, Lord, offer us eternal salvation and freedom through the cost of your spilled blood, soaked on that cross at Calvary." He prays that all George W Bush's decisions are influenced by "God-fearing men," then finally, hoarsely, exhorts everyone to "lock and load for Judgement Day, to be secure about the long time we will all spend on that famous range called ETERNITY." Amen and yee-haa.

The sun sets. I have now worn plastic ear-muffs for two days, and the skin behind my right ear swells and peels: muff-rash.

The night shoot is about to start. Down-range, in the darkness, sit half a dozen 50-gallon drums of fuel strapped with dynamite. When the shooters let rip, the barrels will explode and the night sky will light up with billowing flames and black clouds cross-hatched with multicoloured tracer fire. "Stand at the left-hand side of the range," an old-timer advises me. "That way you get the best concussion."

But Ralph Passonno insists I borrow his shooter's pass and weapon, so I end up on the firing line itself, squeezed between Browning and Thompson machine guns. I'm handed a fully-loaded Colt 223 M16 by Passonno's buddy Pete, a taciturn guy who seems appalled by my lack of firearms experience. As we wait for the order to fire, I say to Pete, "There should be a bumper sticker that says, Never give an Englishman a loaded machine gun.'"

Pete looks at me and laughs without smiling.

www.knobcreekrange.com