This Week's Sneak Peek

As this week's sneak peek suggests, I did not draw a cartoon about the shootings in Arizona on Saturday.

As tempting as it was to leap to the conclusion that incessant right-wing talk about "targeting" Democrats, "locking and loading," and "Second Amendment remedies" -- and protesters pointedly carrying guns to political events -- led to this tragedy as inevitably as "jihad," "fatwas" and "Death to [fill in the blank]" led to other affronts to civilization, it appears for the moment that the gunman may be mentally ill. Not that all the violent, paranoid ranting of tea partisans couldn't have helped feed the gunman's delusions, but you can't really blame Robert DeNiro for the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan because he made a film that fed into John Hinckley's psychosis.

At any rate, my Q Syndicate cartoons are supposed to focus on LGBT issues. So far, the only LGBT angle I've seen on this story has been a statement by Utah's brand new Tea Party Senator, Mike Lee, that has been interpreted to mean that somehow gay marriage made this guy shoot 19 people:

"I don’t know and I don’t think anyone pretends to have the answer to that, but some have pointed to the breakdown in the family structure, many people who engage in these activities come from families that have broken down in one form or another."

Does the phrase "the breakdown in the family structure" really mean "same-sex marriage" in rightwingese? It hardly seems enough to hang a cartoon on, especially when we know less about the killer's family than we do about the alleged killer himself.

Until the motives and motivations of the gunman become clearer, let's all agree that none of us can read his mind or diagnose the source of his paranoia from a distance. But let's take it easy with the shoot from the lip discourse.

And will you Second Amendment purists ever concede that more guns in more hands do not make anybody safer?