By Brian Blanco

You feel a moment. I’m not certain if it’s a second lost or a second gained, but in that moment the Earth stops. It’s the moment you watch a child, a young girl in purple shoes, pull a loaded AK-47 assault rifle from the cab of a pick-up truck.

The child, 9-year-old Brianna, had no ill intentions with the weapon of course. She was simply retrieving the gun for a man she affectionately calls “Uncle Jim”. He is Jim Foster, a 57-year-old former police officer and the leader of the North Florida Survival Group. The organisation teaches children and adults alike to handle weapons, and Jim refers to it as a ‘militia”.

GALLERY: TRAINING CHILD SURVIVALISTS

Jim was the man who, after feeling out my intentions in a two-hour meeting at a chain restaurant a few weeks earlier, had granted me permission to photograph his group’s field training exercise. It was an opportunity I snatched up without hesitation. It’s not every day that a photojournalist gets an invitation to shoot a militia gathering. Understandably, they tend to be fairly secretive groups who don’t exactly keep the media on their Christmas card lists.

When I first emailed Jim requesting access to his organisation for a story about second amendment issues, I fully expected to have my email dragged straight to the trash, never to hear from him again. Within hours he proved me wrong. He left a phone message thanking me for contacting him and agreeing to meet with me face to face, albeit sans cameras or tape recorders.

It wasn’t exactly the response I was expecting from a man whose first few sentences under his “About Me” section of his website, under a photo of him dressed head-to-toe in camo and holding an AK-47, says that he believes our freedom as Americans is in jeopardy and that our government is moving us toward socialism. I knew, based on the political messages and blog entries on his site that he and his members would have strong political opinions and that it might be necessary for me to dust off a cheesy line I stole years ago from an even cheesier Nick Nolte movie from the 1980s where Nolte, playing a predictable version of a war photojournalist, is asked what side he’s on and his response: “I don’t take sides, I take pictures.”

If you’re looking for a well-oiled machine of a militia, the North Florida Survival Group will likely disappoint. Members are not all chiseled young males with high-and-tight hair cuts straight out of central casting. An elderly man in blue coveralls and a borrowed .22 caliber varmint hunting rifle protects the flank of a younger man in a full ensemble of tactical gear and a tricked-out AR-15 assault rifle but while their gear may separate them, their political beliefs unite them.

To their credit, I never had to use my Nolte line with the members of Foster’s group. While the members of the group were clearly passionate about their distrust of our government and, more specifically, our president, they never tried to force-feed me their opinions or interrogate me for mine. Foremost on their minds was gun confiscations. Meeting the group just a few weeks after the re-election of Barack Obama, the prevailing concern among the group was when the next gun ban would be coming and how they should stockpile ammunition and weapons to prepare for it.

An over-sized t-shirt containing a slogan and the logo of the North Florida Survival Group on a young boy carrying a Ruger rifle while covering the flank of a line of militia members searching for an imagined enemy summed up their position with the shirt reading: “I’m willing to die to defend my 2nd amendment rights. Are you willing to die to trying to take them from me?” – That was six days before Sandy Hook. Six days before the country would launch into one of the largest and most heated gun control debates in the country’s history. Six days before so called “assault weapons” and ammunition disappeared, in a frenzied buying spree, from gun store shelves across the nation.

Prior to the shooting at Sandy Hook, Foster said he received on average about one or two people inquiring about signing up for the North Florida Survival Group. Now, after Sandy Hook, he says he get’s about one person signing up per day. “When I first got into this, I thought I’d never have to use these skills in my lifetime but we as citizens have a duty to defend the constitution.” said Foster. “Now it looks like groups like ours are going to be called up to defend the constitution even if it means using force.”

“The government is trying to disarm us,” said Jim. “There weren’t enough dead bodies to do it before, but now they’ve got the bodies of 26 dead kids and I’m afraid that’s enough for them to get what they want,” he said, referring to the 20 children and six adults who were shot at Sandy Hook.

It’s an awkward feeling walking through someone’s home while photographing their children sloshing through rising floodwater in the living room. It is, I can assure you, another feeling entirely when that same homeowner yells down from the second floor, “It could be worse, at least we still have power” as I look over to see the electrical outlets mere seconds away from being submerged. These are the moments that help to remind me that there are dangers involved in covering just about any natural disaster and that it’s important not to be complacent just because a named storm may “only” be a tropical storm, as was the case with Tropical Storm Debby.

SLIDESHOW: DEBBY SLAMS FLORIDA

As a Florida-based photojournalist I’ve covered more named storms than I can recall, ranging from those forgettable storms that, thankfully, produced little more than twigs in the street, to the now infamous Hurricane Katrina. I’ll admit that I was initially guilty of underestimating this storm. After getting the call from Reuters to cover Tropical Storm Debby, I was packing my car when my wife popped into the garage to tell me to be careful and I scoffed and said, “Oh Honey it’s “just” a tropical storm. I’ll go make some rain features and be back in a couple of days.” As it turns out, I was wrong, this storm caused more damage from flooding and tornadoes than I’ve ever seen a tropical storm cause. It ended up touching a lot of lives and, in meeting those affected, touched my life as well.

Logistically speaking, covering Debby was easy. There were no wide-spread power outages, no fuel shortages, no lack of hotel rooms, cell service remained uninterrupted and most businesses and restaurants remained open. All of this meant that I, thankfully, didn’t have to turn my car into a rolling Molotov cocktail with fuel tanks. I didn’t have to transmit photos via an expensive and complicated BGAN (sat phone) and, most importantly, I didn’t have to sleep in my car.

Because the storm was so wide-spread throughout Florida, affecting areas as far south as Sarasota to as far north as the Tallahassee, this was not a storm where you could simply stay-put and cover one geographic “ground zero”, because there was none. So covering it meant we had to keep our ears to the ground, ask a lot of questions and use our best judgment to anticipate where to go next. My colleague Phil Sears and I ended up splitting the state, with him covering the Panhandle and me covering North central Florida. It was a comforting feeling knowing that someone of Sears’ experience and talent was working with me on this one.

I ended up driving almost 1,000 miles in three days covering this storm and, in doing so, met a lot of people that reminded me that there’s an interesting thing about natural disaster victims; that they’re not really “victims” at all. They may have just lost their home, their livelihood and, in the worst cases, a loved one, and yet they’re always resilient and inviting. Never once, in the years that I’ve been covering named storms have I ever had someone turn me away when I show up with a camera and Tropical Storm Debby was no exception. Yes, Debby wasn’t the biggest storm in Florida’s history and we have a long hurricane season ahead of us yet, but to someone who has just lost their home, this storm was every bit as distressful as a Katrina.

Despite the fact that the people I met might have been right in the middle of one of the worst moments of their lives, without exception, everyone I photographed along the way was always friendly, open and, in fact, usually appreciative of the fact that I was there to document their situation. I’m honored to have documented the people that I met during my coverage of Tropical Storm Debby and I sincerely appreciate them allowing me to tell their story to the world.