By JIM GAINES, The Daily News, jgaines@bgdailynews.com/783-3242
Mayor Elaine Walker is one of many mayors nationwide being targeted by the National Rifle Association for her membership in the Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign.

A flier dated Sept. 4 and beginning "Dear Kentucky NRA Member" has turned up in mailboxes around Bowling Green accusing her of belonging to a "national anti-gun group."

The fliers ask NRA members to tell Walker to quit the group, which it calls the "Bloomberg coalition" after its founder and head, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Walker said she's gotten a dozen e-mails, seven or eight letters and one phone call repeating the allegations made in the NRA flier. One also contained a hand-drawn pencil sketch of an armored Goliath trampling a David disarmed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

"Apparently I'm Goliath because I took away his right to bear arms," she said.

Only one message came from someone Walker knew, and that person said he understood her position when she replied with her reasons for supporting the group, she said. Messages that arrive without a return address, she doesn't bother to open, but she's responded to the rest, Walker said.

But her membership in the group is unlikely to change, she said. Walker said she contacted Bowling Green Police Chief Doug Hawkins before joining to make sure it was something local police supported, and researched the issues involved; but intends to "stick by my guns."

"Actually, I do support law-abiding gun owners. That's why I joined Mayors Against Illegal Guns," Walker said.

Some other members of the group are actually NRA members, she said. The NRA claims that any legislative activity regarding guns automatically translates into opposition of legal gun ownership, she said.

"That's not the case," Walker said. "It's pretty clear that the NRA doesn't want limitations even on illegal guns."

Requests for comment to Mayors Against Illegal Guns were not returned, but the organization's Web page explicitly disavows opposing gun ownership - several times.

"We support the Second Amendment and the rights of citizens to own guns," it says. "We recognize that the vast majority of gun dealers and gun owners carefully follow the law.

"But what binds us together is a determination to fight crime, and a belief that we can do more to stop criminals from getting guns while also protecting the rights of citizens to freely own them."

The group's 2006 statement of principles explicitly calls for action on illegal gun sales, and asks for sharing trace data among cities, but says nothing about seeking further restrictions on the legal sale of guns.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns is actually trying to close a legal loophole that exempts gun dealers from doing background checks on their employees, though federal law otherwise says that those involved in gun transactions must be checked for criminal records or mental illness, Walker said. One other legislative effort is to bar those on the federal "No-Fly" terrorism watch list from buying guns, she said.

More than 1 million people are on those lists. Several members of Congress and numerous law enforcement officers have been stopped at airports because their names resembled those on the "No-Fly" list.

Calls to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action in Fairfax, Va., the source of the cards, reached a hold recording or rang unanswered.

The organization's Web page is headlined with denunciations of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and a linked list claims that 48 of the roughly 450 members have resigned as of Wednesday.

Walker said the coalition told her that mayors were the targets of this renewed campaign. There was "a flurry of activity" over the group some time ago, but now the new fear seems to be a rumor that President Barack Obama is going to somehow round up all guns, she said.

"I guess that kind of precipitated it," Walker said. "That's the only thing I can think of, because there hasn't been much action."

The flier says that Mayors Against Illegal Guns was created to oppose "pro-gun reforms" and push for new federal gun restrictions. It promotes "regulating gun shows out of existence" and repealing the Tiahrt Amendment that "protects the privacy rights of law-abiding gun owners," limits trace disclosure to police and protects gun makers from "reckless lawsuits."

"We wrote Mayor Walker and asked her to resign from this anti-gun group, but to date she has refused to do so despite having been informed about its anti-gun agenda," the flier says.

Walker joined Mayors Against Illegal Guns in January 2007, and in June of that year her name appeared on a full-page USA Today ad with the mayors of Covington, Louisville and Newport and dozens of cities in 39 other states. The ad said the Tiahrt Amendment, added by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., each year since 2003 to the annual Department of Justice funding bill and made more restrictive each time, was "undermining police work" by withholding the sales records it keeps on all guns recovered at crime scenes.

An April 2007 statement from Michael Sullivan, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said that the Tiahrt Amendment wrote the ATF's longstanding policy into law. In dispute is whether gun trace data can be released to city legal staffs, or used by law enforcement to track long-term gun sale patterns outside specific investigations of individual crimes.