Gunsapalooza!

At the world's biggest machine-gun shoot, a community of hardcore enthusiasts are married, buried, and bonded forever by their shared passion: blasting away with extreme firearms

- By Ander Monson

When I was at Big Sandy, it all seemed normal. Even the guy who had mounted a machine gun along with a giant disco ball on the back of his boat, which he parked on a trailer overlooking a set of hills that had been seeded with sticks of TNT attached to glow sticks so that if you shot one of the glow sticks, it would explode. Sure, why wouldn't you do that? I thought. This was the Big Sandy Shoot, where, it often seemed, anything went.

Or nearly anything. The rocket launcher affixed to the top of the Hummer, the very first thing I saw when I got up to the quarter mile-long firing line, would not be fired, I was assured. Mikey, one of the shooters from Arizona Armory (a largely AR-15-oriented gun seller and gunsmith in Phoenix), told me they'd get in trouble if they launched rockets, so they wouldn't do that, at least not this weekend. Of the thousands of other guns, though, all laid out on tables and tripods and gun racks, attached to trucks and boats and armored personnel carriers and antiaircraft turrets, pretty much everything would be fired-to spectacular and more than occasionally absurd effect. I would get to fire the World War II-era Browning.50 caliber, the M16, the Smith & Wesson M76 9mm, the MP5, the Uzi, the shorty M16, the Beretta 9mm, the Tantal 5.45x39, the PPSH-41, the Thompson .45ACP, and the AK-47, to start. It was loud as God. It was constant. It was definitely excessive.