He was much larger than me and had a beefy football-player build and short dark hair -- the bouncer type. He was going to get physical if I objected. He was ready to push as we walked quickly past the long row of tables covered with guns and ammunition, past the woman collecting money for admission. Talk to him, I said to myself. Talk to him. I kept telling him I didn't work for the newspapers as he herded me to the exit.

		Wendy Wahman / P-I

"No pictures," he kept repeating.

"No pictures," he insisted one last time as he opened the heavy door and gently pushed me out. Then he closed the door and left me standing outside with my camera dangling from my hand. A hand-lettered sign appeared outside the entrance: NO CAMERAS ALLOWED.

Thirty minutes earlier I had walked into the public fairgrounds to attend a local gun show in Moscow, Idaho. It was the mid-1990s, and I was taking photographs of abandoned lumber mills and deserted mines in the Pacific Northwest. I was shooting what I thought were the industrial ruins of the rural West. I had also taken pictures of men in gun stores eyeing new rifles, and men hunting during deer and elk seasons. I wanted to add pictures of men and women at gun shows. At that point, I wasn't writing about gun culture. I was only taking pictures of daily life in small, rural Western towns.

When I came back to the gun show to talk with the organizer, an unofficial compromise had been reached with the relevant public officials. I could come back the next morning with my camera and take pictures before the public was admitted, provided the exhibitors agreed.

Before I left, I asked him why they enforced rules against cameras. What was the problem? Was it a distrust of government? Did they think I worked for the ATF, the IRS or the FBI? Was it anger against gun-control groups? Did they think I worked for Sarah Brady's handgun organization, or for CeaseFire, a Seattle-based gun violence prevention group? Maybe it was about hunting and animal rights? Or worse, I could be a PETA activist?

He looked at me hard and responded with one word, "Alimony."

"What?" I asked. Had I heard right? "Alimony?"

"Yes, alimony." He explained that the men inside the gun show didn't want their pictures showing up in newspapers where their ex-wives might see them spending what was legally theirs.

Wives were threats. Girlfriends were threats. They are the new scourges of secular life, hunting down unsuspecting men to get bucks and tear out their hearts. Women who talked too much were threats. And women who held public office and wouldn't shut up were the scourge of the land. I also have picked up bumper stickers at gun shows that said: "I just got a gun for my wife. It's the best trade I ever made." Or handouts detailing the "Top 10 Reasons Handguns Are Better than Women," ending with the No. 1 reason, "You can buy a silencer for a handgun." I also had seen some pretty vicious materials on Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno. A new fear floated above some of the gun exhibits: judges, lawyers and voters were giving women too much power, and the women were using that power to take guns away from their husbands, their boyfriends and their constituents. A gun-grabber lurked in the heart of the liberated woman.

Maybe the no-camera rule was about alimony. In this latest male fantasy about the war between the sexes, I could have been hired by a female predator to shoot pictures at a gun show for a ruthless ex- or estranged wife. I was just part of a new generation of bottom feeders out to get men, one of the vast army of women intent on misandry, a new word invented to capture this hatred of men by women.

At the law seminar in Reno during the 2002 National Rifle Association annual convention, I learned about other ways women can grab guns. In the midst of these carefully paced presentations, I first heard about the legal problems gun owners confronted when faced with domestic-violence restrictions. Under the terms of certain restraining orders, ownership of guns is prohibited. Domestic violence and divorce set in motion a range of state and federal statutes and laws aimed at disarming violent or potentially violent intimate partners. The 1996 Lautenberg Amendment that followed passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act made it a federal crime to possess a firearm while subject to a restraining order or after a misdemeanor conviction of the crime of domestic violence.

No one at the law seminar lingered on why there was domestic violence in the United States, or how this violence affected men, women and children, or what steps could be taken to reduce or prevent such violence. For many of the lawyers present, it was strictly a legal issue about due process, federal statutes and legal precedents. What happened in the living room or bedroom, likely sites of what crime analysts called simple assault, was off the political and rhetorical radar screens. I also heard no discussion on how to protect women from men in their own homes. No, the subject was about individuals convicted of misdemeanors or slapped with restraining orders who had lost their right to own firearms. And the big issue was how to get them back. It was all about the guns.

I found out that the police were particularly vulnerable. There was mention of how the Minneapolis Police Department was practically disarmed because so many police had present or past restraining orders against them. No one talked about domestic violence, because violence in the home didn't have the emotional punch of a violent predator breaking into your home. Then the homeowner was a hero defending his property, not a villain beating up on his spouse. The vigilante gun owner could hang a sign in his window announcing "Warning, Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again." But what kind of sign could the battered wife hang up?

In 2005, Ted Nugent, in his keynote address to the NRA annual meeting in Houston, could rant about plugging all the bad guys: "I want 'em dead." But what if the cop or the soldier or the storeowner was the bad guy? Cops were a touchy subject in gun-rights circles. Some police organizations wanted exceptions made for officers under restraining orders, which would make it more difficult for them to lose their firearms. Other cops wanted "law enforcement persons" held to a "higher standard, not a different standard." In 1997, Ronald Hampton, the executive director of the National Black Police Association, testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime. He spoke against exempting police officers. According to other testimony, police and military personnel were implicated in the crime of domestic violence at higher rates than were the general population.

In 1998, the National Institute for Justice reported that each year 1.5 million women were raped or physically assaulted by intimate partners. Many of these attacks occurred in the privacy of the home. Men were more likely to be attacked by strangers. In contrast, women were seven to 14 times "more likely to report that an intimate partner beat them up, choked or tried to drown them, threatened them with a gun, or actually used a gun on them."

As a woman at gun shows, I am usually pitched specific guns to ward off the predator breaking into my house or stalking me. At a gun show in the state of Washington, I spent time talking with an arms manufacturer who specialized in variations of the AR-15, originally made by Colt. This marketing specialist at the booth told me that the AR-15 could be adapted for home defense. I could put in a short barrel, less than 16 inches long -- what cops used in closed spaces to shoot the bad guys. He warned me that he couldn't put the short barrel in the gun receiver because he would be breaking the law. No barrel under 16 inches can go into the gun frame. Instead, he held it about a half-inch from the gun frame and demonstrated how it would work. It was an impressive-looking weapon. Stocky and mean, a dull black.

Only once do I remember a salesman trying to sell me a gun to shoot my husband or boyfriend if he turned abusive. His personal philosophy on life was that everyone should be armed and packing. If everyone in the world were armed, there would be no domestic violence; in fact, there would be no violence at all. The bad husbands would finally get what they deserved. And all the bad people in the world would be stopped -- killed or executed on the spot. He insisted that even everyone in a bar, the traditional hot spot for assault, should be packing heat. Forget about alcohol. The gun itself would stop the violence. So what if the guy packing was drunk out of his skull? The gun had this amazing magic to prevent violence. It was a talisman of peace. I had reached the logical end of the gun-rights argument. Stop crime: Arm everyone.

Yet something was desperately wrong with this picture, even though I knew that some women, fearing for their lives every day, have decided to arm themselves against their ex-loved ones. Overall, domestic violence took the glamour out of the crime scene that pro-gun activists loved to describe. Husbands and wives shooting it out in the living room didn't have the same appeal as the brave homeowner gunning down a crazed burglar. And what about all those ad campaigns to get me to buy guns? The magazine and book tales of masked young predators generated gun sales. How do you advertise buying guns when the criminal was an ex-husband, a boyfriend, or a guy you dated a couple of weeks ago?

At the law seminar, I sat thinking about how much the right to own a gun owed to the typical crime-scene scenario. Those millions of hours that Americans spend watching cop shows and vigilante heroes have helped pump up the psychic investment in guns. Still, I was having a hard time understanding how teams of lawyers for the National Rifle Association and other gun groups were ready to defend men under restraining orders. Maybe I just wasn't listening right.

At one point a question came up about Attorney General John Ashcroft and his push in the Department of Justice to accept the Second Amendment as an individual right to own guns. We were told that the Emerson case would determine whether Ashcroft's position would hold. Over the next couple of years, everywhere I turned in the gun-rights world the Emerson case was heralded as a great Second Amendment victory. Second Amendment activists would hand me copies of the complete legal ruling in paperback form. It was the greatest news to hit the gun lobby in years.

It came down to this: In 1998, the wife of Timothy Joe Emerson filed for divorce and applied for a restraining order against her husband. At a hearing, Sacha Emerson alleged that her husband made a threat over the telephone. He threatened to kill her "friend." The restraining order was granted. Later, her husband was indicted for "possession of a firearm while being under a restraining order." But, in a Texas federal district court, this indictment was dismissed by Judge Sam Cummings. In a memorandum brimming with colonial history, the Second Amendment reared its righteous head. Cummings argued that the federal actions to protect women against intimate partner violence didn't hold up against the struggles of our revolutionary fathers to found a nation with arms.

The government appealed to the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals, which upheld the indictment against the husband. Emerson's attorneys argued there were insufficient judicial findings that he was a "credible threat"; the 5th Circuit Court disagreed. Two of the three judges accepted the argument that while the Second Amendment gave an individual a right to own a gun, it did not give an individual under a restraining order the right to own a gun. This was especially true, the court found, since upon purchasing a Beretta semiautomatic pistol, the husband had signed a BATF Form 4473, stating that "so long as he was under a court order such as that of Sept. 14, 1998, federal law prohibited his continued possession of that weapon." The third judge on the court "chose not to join" in the lengthy individual rights argument because they were "dicta" and "at best an advisory treatise on this long-running debate" and really had nothing to do with the decision made by the court. He went on to say that if the Second Amendment was interpreted as an individual and not a collective right, in a way, who cares? There would still be legal grounds for "reasonable restriction" on gun ownership.

Was Sacha Emerson just another gun-grabbing wife? In reading the opinion of the 5th Circuit Court, I wondered, because most of the opinion was not about the restraining order at all. That question was settled in a concise statement by the judges. Supported by amicus curiae submitted by the NRA, the Second Amendment Foundation, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the Texas State Rifle Association, two of the three federal judges had used the opinion to expound for more than 50 pages about how the Second Amendment protected individual rights.

At meetings of the NRA, including their law seminar, I repeatedly heard these legal opinions, especially arguments focused on what our founding fathers said or didn't say about the right to bear arms. I guess the two federal judges were hoping that the Supreme Court would jump on their position and finally give the gun-rights activists what they had been claiming in their brand of conservative politics for 30 years. The final, sweet vindication by the highest court in the land seemed within reach. The prize was finally in sight. Who cared if some frightened wife in Texas was worried enough to get a restraining order? She was probably overreacting. She didn't need protection; his gun did.

In the end the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear any further appeals. Gun rights activists would have to wait. I wonder how Sacha Emerson reacted to this court drama.

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