One Nation, Under Gun

In my previous life as a consultant, I had an opportunity to travel quite a bit in rural Texas - from gas gathering stations in East Texas to Oil fields in West Texas. During these trips, I used to get fascinated by the people with fascination for guns! Gun racks in the pickup trucks is a pretty common sight in small towns. Why would some one need to carry a gun all the time? After a while, I started accepting guns as just (dangerous) toys.

While working on Zant Seep, we (I and my colleague Chris) once parked our truck in the middle of a cotton field in oil fields of West Texas, and walked about a quarter mile to a ranch house of the owner of the property, to ask him some questions. After we introduced ourselves, the owner said that he thought that we were some miscreants, and for a few minutes he was watching us through his gun scope! He was a pretty nice guy and he showed (off) his gun collection. His gun vault looked as if it belonged to barracks!

The following article in recent News Week reminded me of the above incident.

The Second Amendment tells us that 'a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'

Two hundred years later, in 1999, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives estimated that there are about 215 million guns in America--at least one firearm in half the households in the country. The anti-gun Brady Campaign, however, puts that number at 192 million guns, owned by 39 percent of the population. Either way, that's a lot of firepower.

Photographer Kyle Cassidy wanted to find out who these people were, what they looked like and how they lived. So he traveled 15,000 miles over the course of two years taking pictures of people with their weapons and asking them one question: 'Why do you own a gun?' His new book, 'Armed America,' is the culmination of that project. Keep clicking for Cassidy's portraits of Americans at home with their six-shooters and 12 gauges.