Peterson’s stark black-and-white photographs of the event—shot both inside the enormous convention center, where it took place, and outside, in the rain and the sun, where protests and counter-protests unfolded in front of cameras and curious onlookers—capture the many strange and at times contradictory facets of the firearm-loving culture that dominates much of the country. There’s the earnest appreciation of the futuristic, aesthetically marvellous technologies on display; the primal yearning for the protection and freedoms that firearms can seem to offer; the disdain for legal oversight or intervention of any kind; the moral distance between government and the governed; the clarity and agency of children. The guns in these images can be seen in at least three ways: as toys, adornments, and tools of death. But they are always, unmistakably, in the foreground.