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.
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. “Abused women are five times more likely to be killed if their partners own a gun,” the small print beside one target states, its bullseye hovering over the forehead of a young woman baking.
“Ewoudt had the original idea,” Burrill says. “He was just shocked by the level of gun violence, and the way that guns are part of American culture.” Needless to say, the team do not expect many sales to actual gun ranges, so the designs were launched last week as posters, priced at £25 each plus postage, with proceeds going to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “We’re just hoping they’ll go out into the world,” says Burrill, who is best known as the creator of the Work Hard & Be Nice to People posters. “We hope people will buy them and they’ll go on their walls not just as an art work, but maybe something that can provoke more of a discussion.”
In truth, a discussion is probably the most that anyone can hope for, given the lack of meaningful change achieved by Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, even following the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school two years ago. Besides, gun imagery is already almost mundane on the right. You may recall the crosshairs that Sarah Palin placed over the states where legislators supported Obamacare – enjoining her Twitter followers not to retreat but to “RELOAD!” You may also recall that the targets including Arizona, where congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was later shot in the head. So does Burrill himself believe that the posters will really change anybody’s minds? “Probably not,” he admits. “But like all these things, it’s cumulative. It’ll probably take a couple of generations.”
