Zombies have taken over US shooting ranges, feeding on end-of-the-world craze
US shooting ranges and survival courses full of dummies of the undead, providing socially acceptable thrills that feed off their cultural ubiquity
With their guns cocked and ready, two engineers turned zombie hunters crept through a door and into madness. A dozen bloody, undead faces awaited.
Steve Wynn and Eric Timmerman, who had taken holiday leave to kill zombies, put dozens of bullets in their brains, which turned out to be plastic.
These were zombie targets and dummies, not the flesh-eating ones, and Wynn and Timmerman encountered them at a gun range at the end of a gravel road in Winchester, Virginia. They were students in Zombie Survival 101: Surviving the Horde, a class offered by a state firearms training company that has, like much of the gun world, become infested with zombies.
Around the United States, gun enthusiasts are turning pop culture's fascination with the undead into a socially acceptable target. They are joining zombie eradication teams and snapping up zombie targets, zombie ammunition, zombie gas masks and even zombie killing textbooks, which explain that the only way to execute a zombie is with a head shot.
Late last month, nearly 1,000 people gathered on a Minnesota farm for Outbreak Omega, an annual event of simulated zombie attacks where shooters even rode in a local police team's armoured truck.