Olympics: American shooter Rhode wins record sixth medal in six Games

She started shooting at 10 years old and made the British national team at the age of 12.

Rhode is against increased gun regulation.

“We should have the right to keep and bear arms, to protect ourselves and our family”, Rhode, a five-time Olympic medalist, told Time.

Rhode’s first medal was a gold medal in double trap at the 1996 Atlanta Games. “The Second Amendment was put in there not just so we can go shoot skeet or go shoot trap”.

Hill, from Berkshire, came into her first Olympic Games as a promising young talent.

History was also made by the bronze medal victor, defending champion American Kim Rhode, who joined an elite record-holding group of just five other Olympic athletes who have won a medal in six different Olympic Games.

The Olympian said there are guns that have been passed down in her family for generations and that having to register them as “assault weapons”, as some lawmakers have proposed, could affect her ability to pass the firearms on to her son.

“Some of these laws they are starting to pass now, for instance, in the state of California – if I were to purchase a gun, I cannot loan that gun to someone who is not a blood relative so that means that I can’t loan it to my husband or I can’t loan it to an adopted child”, she told The Guardian recently. “It was put in so we could defend our first amendment, the freedom of speech”. And they will not be passed on to my son, or to me from my father.

“My heart breaks for those people”, Rhode said, adding that such attacks “make me want to carry even more”. “I love that I have these two sides to my personality”, she said, laughing that at one moment she is an elite athlete with a laser focus and at another “a normal 18-year-old”.

But Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and other prominent Olympic sponsors are not interested.

Rhode, 37, won her fifth consecutive medal when she took home gold in the skeet shooting event in 2012. She then went on to win bronze in the event at the 2000 Sydney Games, before taking back her double trap gold at the 2004 Athens Games – the past year of women’s double trap at the Summer Olympics.