“It is the feeling of safety, and maybe a little bit the feeling of power. That is what a lot of Americans say they get from gun-owning, which is ironic because if they looked at the statistics they ought to get a feeling of fear. Protecting your family is a fine notion, but a lot of the time it is in fact the family of gun-owners who get shot.” No, that’s not the lefty Guardian’s editorial page. Instead, it’s the intro to a piece about tendentious images of everyday people with targets superimposed over them intended to drive home the point that, yes Virginia, guns really are bad . . .
To remind people of this – and to make sure the message doesn’t become bogged down in subtlety – the designer Anthony Burrill, the art director Ewoudt Boonstra and the copywriter Zack McDonald have created Innocent Targets, a new series for gun ranges. But in place of the hoodlums and terrorists that everybody loves blowing apart, the team have used pictures of ordinary people.
Yeah, I’m not sure how many gun ranges will stock these targets which feature thought-provoking “statistics” related to each image (for the image at the top, “Abused women are five times more likely to be killed if their partners own a gun.”) Never mind the fact that many facilities already ban targets that features any kind of human image.
As the Innocent Targets web site solemnly proclaims,
There are an estimated 18,000 shooting ranges operating in America today. Many of these shooting ranges sell custom targets featuring thugs, terrorists, aliens and zombies.
The painfully ironic truth is that the real targets of gun violence aren’t these fictional “bad guys” but rather our real-life friends, neighbors, co-workers and children.
Nope, no chance of this hoplophobic trio getting bogged down in anything that will be confused with subtlety. The project is really just a thinly veiled promotional effort for their “creative studio” business. Mission accomplished.