“Owning a firearm brings me some sort of balance. When I am angry at the world I find relief in dropping a clip into the air.” -Drew (photographed below)
Photographer Kyle Cassidy got the idea to document Armed America. Here’s part of his artist’s statement:
The idea was to photograph a hundred gun owners, in their homes, and do a gallery show. I figured this would take about two years. But very soon after I started, it became evident that my ambitions were too low. My mailbox flooded with letters from people I didn’t know wanting to participate — I realized that I could probably photograph a hundred people in two months, but it wasn’t a number of people that was important, it was their stories — a cowboy in Texas, a survivalist in Montana, a deer hunter in Pennsylvania, a sheriff in Georgia, a soldier in Idaho…. What I really needed, I realized, was to get moving, to drive across the country and find America somewhere between here and there.
Cassidy’s book of these photos comes out in October.