3 Gun

The third Sunday of each month in the Northwest corner of Los Angeles County 40 or so people meet to compete in a three gun competition. Each participant is armed with a semiautomatic pistol, a semiautomatic shotgun, and a semiautomatic rifle. The competition is made up of six stages. Each of these stages poses a different scenario, in which a competitor is given a series of targets witch they must shoot with different combinations of the three guns. The scenarios are based on the kind circumstances like the house to house combat seen in Iraq or Afghanistan, because of the offensive nature of these scenarios the competitors could easily be described as "active shooters" but this term is almost exclusively reserved for perpetrators of mass murder, but the competitors in three gun competitions with few if any exceptions view themselves as the good guys, not the bad guys. In my photograph "Stage IV" the competitor for this stage would start seated in the chair shooting two of the 18 targets, From there the shooter must sprint to the two corners of the triangular shooting aria for the rest of the targets. The goal is for the shooter is to land two shots in the kill zone on each human shaped target, at least one of these targets would simulate a hostage situation. Hitting the hostage, signified by white cardboard instead of the standard brown, would result in a loss of points. The competition is to shoot all of the targets as quickly as possible, with the fastest time winning. The day that I photographed this stage the fastest time was 56 seconds to put 40 rounds into 18 targets while moving from position to position. In the course of working through all six stages the competitor is presented with targets as close as 10 feet and as far away as 300 yards.This particular gun range is minimalist in its presentation, in Texas there is a three gun course that involves shooting from suspended helicopter fuselages, parked cars and even taking a zip line to the next shooting stage. I have always been keenly interested in the things and spaces that we built into the landscape. My photographs concern themselves more with land use rather than landscape. I found this place where adults go to play at cops, robbers, soldier and often some amalgam of all three fascinating. Written into these spaces is a relationship to power and the desire that underlies the political ecology of the US.