Ok, I masked out the areas surrounding the gun using Vertus masking filters (so much faster).

Then I added a crosshair and dragon detail, along with some flourishes to the side of the gun (brushes for crosshair and dragon came in some brushes pack I downloaded awhile back. If anyone knows who made them I'll be sure to add the creators in this guide later.) I then used perspective transformations to make them appear correctly on the gun. I duplicated them, inverted the black to white and offset them by 1px right and 1px down, then merged the two layers. This way it looked like small engravings on the side of the gun.

Then I duplicated the gun layer.

Then I used the color adjustment brush and brushed on a yellow pigment onto the gun so that I might make it look more golden. Using this layer I could adjust certain aspects of the original without affecting the entire gun. No gun can be complete golden (and fire safely more than once)

Then I burned and dodged to enhance certain areas and change various lighting from the original.

Then I looked around work for a map of the US (I wanted to be at least a LITTLE accurate, and my memory of geography sucks) and made a rough sketch on a piece of paper. Then I went back to my desk (I'm a security guard... lots of free time) and fired up Inkscape to make a close approximation of my drawing.

Nothing special, just used the pen tool to draw the general outline, seperated it into two distinct parts (no real reason for dividing it the way I did, just wanted it semi-evenly to denote the general populace's attitude towards the 2nd amendment and gun ownership in the US.) and then exported the drawing to a .png, and then placed it back into the original Photoshop document from there.

From there I adjusted the canvas size to make the document a landscape, adjusted the two pieces to make each a layer. I then put star brushes in a few places, used the selections of each piece to invert stars where needed, and added the 2nd amendment in text.

I then copied the gun layer, flipped it 180, inverted the colors and desaturated it. I then duplicated THAT layer and used the blast filter probably 15 times. I then used an eraser to lightly blend out along the blasted parts, all to give me that "disappearing" effect...

Then I merged it all, wasn't satisfied with the 3d on 2d, and used Lucisart to give me more of a "poster" style.