A demonstrator holds up a banner as NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre speaks at a news conference after a popular assault-style rifle was used to slaughter 20 school children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Credit:Getty Images "It's a bit of fun," he says modestly. Downtown the main street is blocked off and a towering stage has been set up for the evening concerts with a banner above it that reads, "This is NRA country". Country bands are already playing from the famous bars that line Broadway. Inside the Music City Convention Centre people file past an ad for Blackhawk holsters that reads, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Any Maggot who Threatens Them", up to a showroom floor that sprawls over 3.5 hectares.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the NRA. Credit:Getty Images It's slow going at peak times, not just because the crowd is thick, but because so many in it are using those little electric scooters to get about, such is their age, size and infirmity. And they are loaded up with bags of goodies emblazoned with gun manufacturers' brand names: Beretta and Smith and Wesson, Colt, Sig Sauer and Bushmaster. An NRA logo on the hat of a shooting instructor at an air gun range during the NRA convention. Credit:Bloomberg The crowd skews older and is overwhelmingly white.

A locust-like sound pervades the hall, a constant click-clack-click of thousands of guns being cocked and then dry-fired. Shayanne Roberts looks at rifles in the trade booth area at the NRA convention. Credit:Reuters NRA delegates are in awe of the AR-15, the popularity of which increased after its use in massacres in Colorado and Sandy Hook. A stall holdershows me a tiny five-shot .22 revolver, hardly bigger than a cigarette lighter, which he insists is powerful enough to kill. "Everyone talks about the .22," he says, "and it's true you get a lot of deceleration on impact, but that just means the bullet bounces around inside." This is a good thing because it tears up the organs more.

A young girl, who is already an NRA lifetime member, gets her photo taken holding a rifle painted pink and white in the trade booths at the convention. Credit:Reuters He swears a US marine sniper in Afghanistan who carried one of the little guns in his shirt pocket killed two people in close-quarters combat while on deployment. Elsewhere a rep is showing off Steyr rifles to a small crowd. They are very similar to Australian army standard issue, but people prefer the shorter barrels for home defence. And, of course, they are not sold with the full automatic capability. People calling for gun control demonstrate on a street a few blocks away from the site of the NRA convention. Credit:AP At another stall I'm walked through the Kalashnikov range, from the AK-47 rifle, known so well on battlefields around the world for its distinctive banana-shaped magazine, to a semi-automatic shotgun with a 10-round clip.

But the overwhelming crowd favourite is the AR-15. This is the most popular gun in America at the moment, and you can see people fondling and shouldering variations at stalls across the exhibition hall. Green dots from laser sights skitter across the ceiling. Some guns are painted pink to appeal to female gun fans. Credit:Nick O'Malley The AR-15 became notorious – and far more popular – after its use in the massacres in Colorado and Sandy Hook in 2012. Its critics call it a "military-style assault rifle", which makes the industry bristle. Publicly the industry calls it a "modern sporting rifle", but all the euphemisms slip away in advertising material that is full of images of soldiers, police and special forces operators wielding AR-15s. A military-style vehicle on display at the NRA convention. Credit:Nick O'Malley

"Whether it's for a soldier on the battlefield or for home defence, we only make our rifles one way," says a brochure at one of the stands, "to the highest possible standard." In truth the only difference between military and domestically sold AR-15s is that the domestic version does not have a full-automatic mode. A band performs at the NRA convention. Credit:Nick O'Malley That and the fact that many domestic models are sold in bright pink to cater to the expanding market for women. Despite all the guns, the music, the show bags and the raffles, despite the thousands of stalls, the real business of the convention was done a floor above the exhibition hall in a ballroom that seats 8000.

A stand offering NRA membership benefits to pets. Credit:Nick O'Malley It is in this room that it becomes clear what this event really is: a conservative political rally directed by a single-interest group at the height of its powers. When the group's figurehead, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre​ strides onto the stage, after members have held hands for a prayer, the crowd erupts and he starts dishing out the red-meat rhetoric they love. Gun promotions at the NRA convention. Credit:Nick O'Malley "I vow on this day the NRA will stand shoulder to shoulder with you and good, honest decent Americans and we will stand and fight with everything we've got and in 2016, by God, we will elect the next great president of the United States of America and it will not be Hillary Rodham Clinton," he says.

"She will not bring a dawn of new promise and opportunity. It would be a permanent darkness of deceit and despair forced upon the American people to endure." A big gun is promoted at the NRA convention in Nashville last weekend. Credit:Nick O'Malley Over four hours nearly every Republican running or considering a run for their party's nomination for next year's presidential election appears on stage and prostrates themselves before the NRA. Only two big names were not in attendance – Chris Christie, who is considered suspect by the NRA, and Rand Paul, who has associated himself with a gun group that considers the NRA too soft. An attendee handles a revolver in the Sturm, Ruger & Co., Inc. booth at the 144th National Rifle Association annual meeting in Nashville. Credit:Bloomberg

One by one the rest of the candidates appear on stage and echo LaPierre's fears about the dangers of immigration across the southern border, the need to remain armed against the threat of Islamic terrorism creeping into America, and, worst of all, of liberal politicians who would dismantle freedoms from within and turn the government against the people. The first step would be to disarm them. A stand promotes silencers. Credit:Nick O'Malley "This weekend, Hillary Clinton is announcing for president," Senator Ted Cruz says. "Well, I tell you, if Hillary Clinton is going to join with Barack Obama and the gun-grabbers and come after our guns, then what I say is, 'Come and take it'. "If they're going to come after the constitution, what the American people, what we say together is, 'Come and take it". ... I am both humbled and proud to stand with you as together we bring back, we revive, that shining city on the hill that is the United States of America."

The crowd outside the NRA convention. Credit:Nick O'Malley Rick Santorum​, a hard right Catholic says, "Freedom is under assault not by the gay and lesbian community, but by the left in America ... What is under assault today is the freedom to exercise your faith." The hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham links the war on terrorism to Democratic foreign policy weakness. "We're at war. This is not a time of peace," he says. "My goal is to make sure that we go after those bastards that are trying to kill us and everybody like us, and make sure they feel the wrath of this country – that we dig them out and we kill them, because there is no other substitute."

Mike Huckabee​, an evangelical Christian, adds, "The gun nuts are not the people who own guns, the gun nuts are the people who are afraid of firearms and think that the whole country would be safer if we take them away from law-abiding people and create a gun-free zone where we are all sitting ducks." It goes on for hours. We hear from Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal​ and Donald Trump. Finally the attendees spill out into the spring evening to enjoy the street concert and the bars. The streets are packed with people dancing and buying beers and BBQ from street kiosks and bars. But despite the gun talk from the stage, despite the holstered pistols you occasionally see on hips, the mood remains far less menacing than a big night in the Cross or King Street. Over the weekend a series of seminars flesh out the NRA's bleak view of the state of the nation. In his presentation on "emerging threats" the "ex-CIA personal protection expert" Steve Tarani, briefs the audience on how sharia has already taken over sections of Detroit and nearby Dearborn, Michigan. He describes riding along with a SWAT team. "The street signs suddenly went from English to Arabic. There wasn't a single English word on any shop or any street sign. And in fact, these little yellow signs were posted all along the edges. Jeremy said to me, 'this is it. We don't go past this line'. "I have seen it with my own eyes, witnessed it in the back seat of a car and it is for real. No-go zones exist in the United States," Tarani says.

A Detroit Police Department spokesman later tells Fairfax Media the claims are untrue, and the Dearborn deputy police chief says it is an "absolute absurdity". In another seminar the author Lieutenant-Colonel Dave Grossman briefed attendees on the growing threat of mass killings, and the need to remain armed in self-defence. "Folks, we have raised a vicious, vicious generation of children," he says. "They have given us crimes on children like nothing in human history. Sandy Hook is just the beginning. Our founding fathers knew there would be days like this ... And they created the Second Amendment for just a time like this. And in the midst of all that, the politicians want to disarm our citizens. That is flat-out treason." What is striking as you make your way about the convention is the marked difference between the carnival atmosphere and the violence of the rhetoric. People are welcoming and engaging and having a good time as they move between the lectures and the concerts and the BB gun ranges and the family sporting events. Nonetheless those who spoke with Fairfax Media broadly agree with what they are hearing.

Joe Hemphill is a lighting technician from Florida. He does not believe that the government has yet succumbed to tyranny, but that it is at the edge, hence the need for the strong defence of the Second Amendment. Hearing my accent he says he wishes the US government would adopt Australia's border protection policies. He is convinced sharia is spreading in Michigan. And despite the NRA's endless parade of political victories – federal gun control efforts mooted after the Sandy Hook massacre have failed, Congress has abandoned attempts to ban a bullet capable of piercing body armour, concealed carry rights are expanding through the states – he is convinced by LaPierre's message that the Second Amendment is at dire risk. At an April 2008 fundraiser in San Francisco, then-senator Barack Obama described the difficulty of trying to appeal to lower middle-class people in the Midwest, mostly whites, who had seen their communities ravaged by economic and demographic change for 25 years, and had grown cynical about promises from politicians seeking higher office.

"So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or, you know, anti-trade sentiment [as] a way to explain their frustrations," he said. The description of white Midwesterners clinging to guns and religion needlessly and deeply offended many, though it was often reported out of context. It has become a shibboleth of America's ongoing culture war, just as the NRA has become a champion of the same war. Obama's words still resonate in this crowd. One of the most popular T-shirts at the convention read, "I'll keep my guns, freedom & money, you can keep your 'change'," echoing the hope and change slogan of the 2008 Obama campaign. In Nashville it becomes clear that the NRA has successfully bundled and packaged all of these anxieties and linked them to gun ownership. It has done it so effectively that the Republican Party is bound to show up in force. Its candidates know that while an NRA endorsement does not guarantee victory, NRA opposition can kill a campaign. Fear then is the source of the LaPierre's power. He can maintain membership, dues and donations, and he can direct the voting of 3.5 million-plus members, as long as he can keep them scared of a world that he once memorably described as being full of "terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all".

This is a neat trick because the fear not only drives political behaviour, it drives gun sales, and while the NRA was once a grassroots organisation, it now raises significant revenue from the industry. According to a 2013 Business Insider report the NRA received up to $52 million from the gun industry from its Ring of Freedom sponsor program between 2005 and 2013, and took in another $21 million in advertising sales in its magazines. Several manufacturers donate a portion of each sale or automatically sign up customers at the point of purchase. This is crucially important because as America's rural population has declined, the number of gun owners in America has declined, but the industry has been able to increase sales nonetheless. The number of households that owned guns has dropped from 50 per cent to 32 per cent since 1980, while the number of guns in circulation climbed from an estimated 192 million in 1994 to 310 million in 2009.

While a hunter might own a couple of rifles and a shotgun, a buyer concerned with self-defence will likely add handguns to their collection. Someone who fears a tyrannical government might build a small arsenal. The last speaker of the weekend is the 66-year-old Detroit rock singer Ted Nugent, who is introduced as a man "so patriotic that even Uncle Sam calls him Uncle Ted". He was once questioned by the Secret Service for an oblique threat to assassinate Obama. He has become one of the NRA's most prominent proxies and the ballroom is packed again for his address. On stage he thanks the most important people in the world, the US armed forces, and then the good people of the NRA. "If you are not an NRA member, the enemy likes you, and if the enemy likes you, I don't."

The crowd roars. His ad-libbed address goes on for more than an hour, skipping about between the sanctity of the Second Amendment and the NRA, and the crimes of enemies. The only reason Hillary Clinton is not yet in jail, he says, is because "we the people" have so far failed to arrest her. It is not clear what she should be arrested for. "The greasome threesome of power - government, academia and the media - are liars, they hate freedom, they hate the NRA, they hate conservation … because if they hate me they have to have to hate all that stuff, because I am all that stuff and you are all that stuff." He is deeply concerned that there are many good upstanding members of the NRA who are still mixing with the enemy.

"You can't be in my band if you are not an NRA member, you can't be in my crew if you are not an NRA member, you can't drive my bus, you can't tune my guitar, you can't get downwind of my free ass unless you are an NRA member," he says to more cheers. "Our goal is to go home after this wonderful soul-cleansing, spirit-invigorating celebration of the most perfect example of human freedom known in the history of planet earth, and that is the right to keep and bear arms to defend ourselves and family, and go forth and by this time next year, how 'bout each of you sign up another hundred members." There are more cheers. "There is only one gun law we need: don't shoot the wrong guy." Guns in America

* 5 per cent of the world's population live in the US, where 50 per cent of the world's guns are owned * 192 million guns were in circulation in the US in 1994; in 2009, 310 million * 62 per cent: the increase in available guns from 1994 to 2012 * 31 per cent of Americans owned a gun in 1985; in 2014, the figure was 22 per cent * Support/Oppose more gun control in 2014: 50-47 per cent

* Support/Oppose background checks for all gun buyers: 92-7 per cent Source: 2007 survey by UN Office on Drugs and Crime, National Institute of Justice survey, Congressional Research Service report, General Social Survey, June 2014 Quinnipiac poll