Lines drawn through once-friendly small towns where pleas are politicized, fall on deaf ears

Gun rift widens, year after Newtown




Even when the public found some common ground, widely supporting expanded background checks for gun purchases, lawmakers could not agree. President Barack Obama failed to push through proposals for the wider checks, a ban on military-style rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

There have been more tragedies since the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The worst was in September when a lone gunman killed 13 people at the Washington Navy Yard. Obama wondered then if such shootings had lost the power to shock: “I fear there is a creeping resignation that these tragedies are just somehow the way it is, that this is somehow the new normal.”

But beneath the paralyzed politics of gun control, striking discord remains in U.S. towns and neighborhoods. Americans haven’t forgotten or become numb. They just can’t bridge the divide between those who insist stricter firearms laws are the only solution and those who view gun ownership as a basic right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, crucial not just for hunting but for self-protection.

The small town of Nelson, Georgia, was an unlikely flash point. With 1,300 people, it has so little crime that officials have debated whether it needs a full-time police officer.

Then Bill McNiff, a retired accountant, suggested to councilman Duane Cronic that the town should have a law requiring everyone to own a gun. McNiff says the ordinance declared values ignored by gun control advocates in America’s big cities.



“I chat with him and we see our neighbors, there’s conversation,” McNiff says of Kellett. “Or as I’m prone to say, he’s an idiot, so I just put up with him.”

He said gun control advocates just don’t understand the point of view of someone who might need a gun because they “have 55 acres and occasionally a coyote walks through.” Critics “looked at (Nelson’s law) from their ideological point of view, which is that they’re anti-gun. They didn’t look at it from the point of view that we wanted to prevent the government” from taking away people’s guns.

Asked about his neighbor, Kellett declines to use McNiff’s name or give credence to his argument. He says the outcome of the dispute did little to reshape a debate that leaves many people cowed into keeping quiet.


“I talked to people who had not owned a gun in 50 years and didn’t intend to get one and I talked to people who had always had a gun forever,” he added. That’s why I didn’t want the city of Nelson to be blown out of proportion, like we’re some sort of an armed camp.”


The Police Commission crafted an ordinance restricting hours and locations of target shooting. But at a hearing in August 2012, about 60 gun owners criticized the proposal as a breach of the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which protects to right of citizens to own firearms. Only one resident, Jim Ondak, rose to support it.

Then came 20-year-old Adam Lanza’s rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary. The grief it unleashed changed everything.




Poupon said he hears fewer shots and thinks maybe people have decided on their own to rein in shooting. But people on both sides are troubled by what the debate revealed.

The intensity of gun owners’ opposition and the pressure they put on local officials “was a real wake-up call,” Ondak’s wife, Andrea, says.

Meanwhile, Dave Barzetti, a welder and target shooter, says the debate reflects troubling changes. The father of two feels the target shooting ordinance is part of a big-government intrusion on life that makes him uncomfortable.

His wife, Carla, says a large tax hike, compounded by the divide over guns, convinced them they no longer belong. In September, they bought property in Tennessee.





For Paul Libera, grieving wasn’t enough. The fire had destroyed a house where each summer he had gathered area kids for a water skiing camp.

In January, he spent $600 for a large sign, lettered in red, and planted it in the frozen ground next door to the site of the ambush.

“How many deaths will it take ’til we know too many people have died?” the sign asked.

Libera says he was “raised with guns under my bed and in my closet and with birdshot coming out of the food we were eating.” He went to college on the money his state trooper dad earned in the gun and fishing tackle store he ran on the side.



Meanwhile, signs sprouted in some yards in Webster demanding repeal of a new state gun control law pushed through by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

