There are thousands of gun shows in America each year, but machine gun shows are a rare spectacle. At the two-day hands-on shootfest that is the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot & Trade Show (OFASTS) exhibitors rent out fully automatic weapons to the public so that they may annihilate refrigerators, ovens and other household appliances.
Photojournalist Pete Muller recently scratched a years-long itch to visit OFASTS and documented his trip.
'I grew up in a congested and heavily regulated area of the northeast and consequently had little exposure to guns and gun culture,' says Muller. 'What was happening at OFASTS was unlike anything I'd seen or experienced.'
Muller has seen a lot of guns. Between 2009 and 2012, he lived in Sudan documenting the tense transition from civil war to independence for the South ' even now the peace agreement on which independence rests remains fragile and not without skirmish. While Muller pursued his long-term story in Sudan, he was also thinking of gun culture in the United States, specifically the recreational use of machine guns. That's when OFASTS came on his radar.
Held annually in Wyandotte, Okla., OFASTS is ' alongside the Knob Creek Machine Gun Show (Kentucky) and the Big Sandy Shoot Out (Arizona) ' one of the largest machine gun shows in the country. Over a hundred vendors trade machine guns there, with prices in the thousands and sometimes in the tens of thousands. Though prices are high, the opportunity for machine gun enthusiasts to shoot others' weapons is a big draw.
Whether your fancy is the M248 SAW, which fires 750 rounds per minute, or the FN M240B, which is the U.S. armed forces current-issue medium machine gun, there's a firearm for everyone. There's also a dynamite crew on hand to beef up the explosions. At $10 a day or $18 for the weekend (under-10s get in free), it's good bang for your buck. Gun and magazine rental prices vary.
'Given the politicized nature of the gun discussion, I wanted to better understand this fundamental element of our national ethos,' says Muller, who was skeptical of others' viewpoints on gun issues and wanted to see OFASTS for himself.
South Sudan and Oklahoma are extremely far apart in both geography and culture, yet Muller says that generally communities' proximity to state security institutions shape their affinity for and possession of firearms. OFASTS is the type of exposition special to rural America; permits for machine gun shows aren't very likely to be passed out in urban areas.
'People living in the periphery are often more likely to possess weapons as a means of insuring their personal security. This propensity increases, of course, if the isolation in which they live is, or is perceived to be, fraught with danger,' says Muller.
OFASTS culminates in 'Kill the Car,' a moment when every gun-wielding attendee takes aim at a free-wheeling, explosives-packed car rolling down a hillside. Within a minute, tens of thousands of bullets pepper the condemned beater. Heaps of empty shells scatter the mainline shooting gallery.
During Muller's stay, attendees ranged from lawyers and investors to IT experts and even an unnamed former Apple executive.
'Owning legal machine guns is an expensive hobby. Most of the gun owners are pretty well-heeled,' he says.
For those accustomed to guns, especially automatics, events like OFASTS can be as welcoming and innocuous as a state fair. For outsiders, the shows and the photos from them can be quite shocking and, in some cases, disturbing.
'I find it somewhat peculiar when people seem surprised by the ongoing American love affair with guns. The country was acquired in a way that required guns. Expansion of the American frontier was a severely violent process in which the gun played a central role, its sanitized memory has since become a pillar of white American nostalgia. It represents notions of freedom, individualism and valor and all of those things are tied to patriotism,' says Muller.
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All images: Pete Muller
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