Without that knowledge and respect, a gun can become a devastating tool. Hunters are also taught that there should always be constant respect for one’s gun and the second a person loses that respect is when accidents happen. It is how you use the tool that is what distinguishes the hunters from the school shooters. The number one rule a hunter learns before owning a gun is that it is a tool. It connects me with a side of life that is more than just the daily grind of a high schooler. When you are sitting in a hunting blind for hours in the cold it just takes a second to listen and hear all the cogs and gears turning and grinding in mother nature’s clock, which is the world. An escape from the pressures of being a junior in high school, the pressures of technology and the stereotypes of being a teenager in modern society.
I get some flack from people about why I like guns and hunting, and all I can say is that it is an escape. Let us know what you think in the comments. We’re honoring 15 winners, 11 runners-up and 14 honorable mentions whose photos and accompanying artists’ statements impressed us most.
Photos that clearly used filters or editing software to, for example, selectively apply color, blur some of the field, or otherwise manipulate objects and people, had to be eliminated no matter how much we loved them.Īnd now, on to the photos we did choose. One finalist described his image from a climate change march this way: “We are tired of our elders running into dead ends when it comes to change, so we have taken it upon ourselves to be the force behind a movement.”Īn important note before we show you our winners: This year we had to disqualify many images because they did not follow our rules.
“We become so focused on the future that we forget how to be people, forget we are people.”Īnd yet, in image after image, from all over the United States, from Turkey, Switzerland, South Korea and Hong Kong, they also showed us they have fierce beliefs that they are passionate about defending. “It’s drilled into our minds from a young age that there’s a strict pattern to success that must be followed,” another finalist wrote. But they also wanted us to know that, as one finalist put it, “being next to the teenage-adult border is not easy.” They are tired and overwhelmed, and the burden of trying to live up to expectations haunted these submissions.