[Leica] armed america --frustrating faults and limitations

[kcassidy at asc.upenn.edu (Kyle Cassidy)]

Steve hit something right on the head -- and very hard, when he pointed
out: "clearly the folks who want to be photographed in their living
rooms  with their guns are a very minute subset of gunned America, so
it's  not evident what they represent... (except people who want to be
photographed in their living room with  their guns...)"
 
while working on this, i put a lot of time and energy into convincing
gun owners that i wasn't out to ridicule them, that i really did just
want to know why they owned guns -- that i wasn't making any judgements
at all -- one way or the other, that i truely wanted an apolitical book
-- and these people ended up coming out in droves to get photographed.
but what i'm having the most difficult time getting are people who own
guns but either don't like them, don't want them, or don't care about
them. people who inherrited guns from family members or have them left
over from a previous phase of their lives. right now, these are the
people i'm most interested in, but their story is proving the most
difficult to tell -- simply because they don't want to be photographed
with a gun. during this trip i had no less than five such people back
out. i'm in pennsylvania, so i can photograph deer hunters till i'm blue
in the face -- but what i really want right now is someone who says
"this is my dad's gun. i hate guns, but i don't know what to do with
this. so it sits in the closet" -- that's a missing part of this story
and these voices are the ones i'm afraid are going to go unheard. 
 
advice is always apprecaited.
 
kyle "mojave desert with no air conditioning survivor" cassidy