Take Aim

As a trauma surgeon I must agree with Ed. Over 45% of all the GSW's I have had to operate on are "accidental" and were inflicted by friends and family members. 100% of the time the person pulling the trigger said the gun wasn't loaded and/or they didn't really pull the trigger (followed by "it just went off") .


Miles

i guess if you are going for "drama" you succeeded ...

Interesting arguments and the one about all guns being loaded was drilled into me and the argument that guns do not solve problems. But the real question is about the photo and this photo uses an action color to step outside the bouindaries and make us respond. I like the effect better than the very nice photo of a .45 cocked without a hand attached. Thanks for the creative effort in the photo and the emotion it stimulated.

Wow -I never thought I would get this kind of response..!

So, I'll try and disassemble this picture by providing some facts.

About guns:
1) guns in Greece are very uncommon, especially in the cities. Deaths by firearms are something like 10 per year, with most of them being hunting accidents and such. In fact, any kind of death by firearm becomes a quite big public matter and is considered a very bad thing. Compare this with the hundreds of people who die by road accidents whom nobody raises a public issue about and tell me if we're crazy...
2) criminals have guns, of course, but they too tend to use them mostly against each other (night club gangs fighting and such) and even then it's not common. Every 5-10 years or so two gangs get on some kind of war, and a handful of them die execution-style. Nothing out of the criminal ordinary - we don't have any kind of mafia here, just small time gangs.
3) most of the male population gets to shoot a gun only once - in the army. I shot a M-14 when I was doing my service and I never held a gun again since then.

About this photo:
1) I was looking for a pistol for some time now, because I wanted to use it in a bride-and-groom photoshoot - admittedly not a very common photoshoot - well, they ain't your typical run-of-the-mill bride and groom.
2) I got this one from a friend, and of course it's not usable - its barrel is jammed. You can cock it and pull the trigger, though.
3) two days later, my new mamiya c220f arrived and I wanted to check whether it functioned properly - at the same time, I wanted to test how the fuji pro 800z would react to pushing - I rated it at 1600 and developed it at 3200.
4) however, I couldn't just waste a film without photographing a model, so I asked a friend around to pose for me. The Colt was an obvious choice, this frame was a nice (although quite common) idea, et voila.

I'm quite satisfied with the macro function of the mamiya, as well as the film's reaction (the tungsten lighting did not treat it well), and I consider this a well executed photograph of a common concept: the holding-you-at-gunpoint pose. I think I would also like it in b/w.

In retrospective, and after reading all your comments, I never really thought about the weapons issue - OK, I knew the photo had an obvious message, but I've seen this kind of gun posing/framing/focusing so many times that I've stopped thinking about its message...

Very nice photo

Bill

I like this image. I have been a shooter for 40+ years. Most anti-gun folks have never touched a firearm. Like animal rights activists, "the further one gets from the wilderness, the more of an animal rights activist one becomes."