But, No, I Have Not Yet Been to Sandy Hook.
by Maureen Cain
“Have you been to Sandy Hook?”
I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count. It’s what everyone wants to know when I tell them about United States of Ammunition, the art project that’s taking me to sites of shootings in all 50 states. What they’re really asking is: Have you been to the place where the most terrible thing happened?
No, I haven’t been to Sandy Hook, not yet. But I’ve been to exactly 122 other places where terrible things have happened. Besides first responders and law enforcement, I have been to more sites of gun violence in the US than anyone. I tell the people who ask about Newtown -- perhaps with an inappropriate amount of enthusiasm -- about the places I’ve been. Can we talk about Tucson or Las Vegas or the Garlic Festival? Can we talk about Pulse Nightclub? The Oregon Trail or The Trail of Tears? JFK, RFK, MLK, Harvey Milk? Tupac or Biggie or Marvin Gaye? I’ve been to all those places. Let’s talk about that.
Anything, please, to avoid the unique pain of Newtown, Connecticut.
I’ve been to Columbine, our collective jumping off point for a decades-long epidemic of angry white boys shooting schoolchildren. I also went to Parkland, in a similarly affluent neighborhood on the other side of the country, where the terror of school shootings continued 20 years later.
I learned in Savannah, Georgia, in front of the house where a 16-year-old boy shot and killed his 13-year-old girlfriend, with my face pressed into the asphalt of her driveway, in front of a fresh memorial of pink balloons and pink teddy bears, that no scale exists to measure the relative horror of gun violence. Every single shooting is the most terrible shooting.
I started this project last July when a box of 1,000 rounds of ammunition was mistakenly delivered to my address in Seattle. My first thought: “Who knew you could order bullets online?” My second thought: “I need to make art with this.” But not with live ammunition, so I called the sheriff’s office and they came and took the bullets away. Instead, I went to firing ranges and collected thousands of bullet casings, or “brass” as I’ve learned to call them. I washed the brass and painted them cheerful colors. A year later, those same painted casings have traveled border-to-border and coast-to-coast.
I photograph the bullet casings in temporary art installations at sites of mass shootings, police brutality, domestic violence, suicide, genocide and assassinations. In El Paso, behind the Walmart, I set up 1,000 rainbow-colored casings in the shape of the Great State of Texas. I used the casings to outline a memorial dove embedded in the sidewalk on the street in Ferguson, Missouri, where police killed Mike Brown. I learned the names of Atatiana Jefferson, Oscar Grant and De’Von Bailey. All killed by police.
My white lady privilege allows me to stroll into places and situations that would certainly find people of color harassed, arrested or shot. I trespassed in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, birthplace of the Aryan Nations. At the Arizona-Sonora border, I stuck my arm between the slats of the wall to photograph casings on the Mexico side of the line. U.S. Border Patrol agents watched through their binoculars while I played hokey-pokey across the international frontier. I snuck into a Trump-loving gun show and took unauthorized photographs of cowboys buying AR-15s. All under the cloak of my whiteness.
The same people who ask if I’ve been to Sandy Hook tell me I’m brave to have done those things. They don’t know that the night I came home from the gun show, I drank an entire bottle of limoncello to wash away the low grade PTSD. They are unaware that online I hide behind a fierce 17-year-old girl who manages my social media accounts because I’m terrified of the haters. I use family and friends as personal security at photoshoots and I drag them on road trips because there’s no way in hell I’m doing this alone. They also bring much-needed levity to the dark endeavor we now call “Mo’s Funtime Tours.”
When there’s a break in the plague and it’s safe to travel again, I’ll get a friend in the car with me and I’ll check the remaining states off my list. I’ll go to Hawaii and Alaska. I’ll spend a lot of time in Chicago. I’ll finally go to Sandy Hook, one of the many, many places where the most terrible thing happened.
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See more photos at United States of Ammunition. Gun violence data from www.gunviolencearchive.com, www.giffords.org, ww.wikipedia.org, and www.everytown.org For media or partnership inquiries, please contact: maureen@thecainagency.com. All images (c) Maureen Cain 2019-2020