I’m heading to Wyoming in a few minutes to continue with some work that I started last month.  Looking forward to being able to share a finished product, but the mighty god of publication embargos will prevent that until the project runs.  

Went to my third machine gun shoot last weekend, adding chapters to an ongoing look at the role of the gun as part of the bigger American archetype.  Kinda’ fun to go to these things now after becoming more familiar with the people, the guns, the sound, and the concussion that goes along with them.  Every time I sit down to write one of these gun posts, I find myself wanting to point backwards to my initial sentiments that I shared after attending my first shoot.  The write-up is available here.  The only pieces of that story to have changed are that my friend, mentioned in the beginning of the text, who struck an IED in Afghanistan, has since been awarded a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star; Lester, the happy farmer with the bowling ball cannon, finally made the photo edit and is pictured below with his son, Daniel; And the event’s organizer, Bob McBride, was kind enough to loan me a pair of gloves for the latest shoot.  The hole in the index finger was, according to McBride, for boogers.  Turns out it worked just as well to adjust camera controls.  

These are a few of the Polaroids I took away from the last shoot.  Only had a few hours on account of some other work I had to return to Denver for.  Color photos to follow sometime in the next week.

Smoke drifts from the line of fire, the product of a “reactive target,” a car rigged to explode when it it shot, at the 2009 Cheyene Wells Machine Gun Shoot