Quick Draw

I found this photo online and felt compelled to do a drawing. In the photo there are several other children, all with toy guns. When I was little, I don't remember playing "guns" in any generic "cops & robbers" sense, but gunplay was certainly ubiquitous as a competent to a lot of the imaginary scenarios that me, my brother and cousins inhabited. Given that we grew up before Colombine happened, and well before the desensitization of mass shootings, it's not a surprise that we did feature guns the way we did, without much afterthought. Obviously there was something different in the mythology and meaning of guns then, something we are struggling as a society to reimagine now. This drawing, for me, captures something interesting about the dynamics between then and now, play and reality, and not only safety, but how we care for each other... or how we don't.