Sticking By Our Guns

Almost ten years ago, I posted a collection of my cartoons I drew in response to mass shootings in the U.S. Even though my bailiwick is the LGBTQ+ press, I'm still drawing cartoons on that same tragic topic, because the carnage hasn't stopped, and the LGBTQ+ community has by no means been spared.

Today's Graphical History Tour highlights one cartoon I've drawn about mass shootings in America per year since my last round-up of the damn things.

✍

After the Pulse nightclub massacre nine years ago, when a gunman killed 49 patrons of an Orlando nightclub with a predominantly Latino clientele, I submitted two cartoons to Q Syndicate. One, featuring an American flag at half staff, a rainbow rising out of black clouds, and a quotation attributed to one of the victims, was the one run by most (if not all) publications that printed my cartoons.

June, 2016

Because I thought that the cartoon did not work in grayscale, I also submitted this alternative cartoon, highlighting the callous reaction of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, and his non-apology apology for it. But even the Philadelphia Gay News, which prints my cartoon in grayscale, went with the flag and rainbow cartoon.

The next year, a heavily armed gunman holed up in an upper floor room of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas and opened fire on an outdoor country music festival across the strip. Armed with enough high-powered rifles and bump stocks to equip a battalion, the gunman fired 1,000 rounds into the crowd over the space of ten minutes. 58 concert goers were killed and hundreds injured before the gunman turned a gun on himself.

October, 2017

The list in this cartoon is tragically incomplete. I could have added Catholics at mass, Jews at synagogue, newspaper staffers, Veterans Home workers, Waffle House patrons, and on and on.

Some forty years ago, we used to call mass shootings "going postal," on account of cases of disgruntled postal workers shooting up their place of employment. Nowadays, we can just call it "going American."

February, 2018

In February of 2018, the scene of mass shooting was Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Death toll: 17 students and staff. Injured: 18. Response by the Florida legislature: legislation to protect students from the evils of pornography and requiring the posting of "In God We Trust" in every classroom in the state.

August, 2019

In one week in July and August, 2019, a mass shooting at a Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California left three dead; 23 were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and two at a Walmart in Southaven, Mississippi; yet another outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio killed nine; and one was killed and fourteen injured in a pair of mass shootings in Chicago.

Those were only five mass shootings out of 417 that year as defined by the Gun Violence Archive — more than one per day on average — with a total death toll of 15,381.

Such incidents dipped in the COVID year 2020. There were no mass shootings recorded between March 20 (Springfield, Missouri) and September 19 (Rochester, New York), the longest such gap since 2003.

And all it took was a mysterious, incurable disease taking hundreds of thousands of lives the old-fashioned way.

December, 2021

Congressional Gun Nuts Thomas Massie (R-KY, and yes, he's the Republican co-sponsoring a bill demanding release of the Epstein files) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) responded to a late 2021 school shooting by posting photos of themselves and their families posing in front of their Christmas trees, everyone brandishing a high-powered rifle.

November, 2022

Five patrons of Club Q, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, were killed and 25 injured when a gunman armed with an AR-15 style rifle, a Glock 17 style polymer handgun, and wearing protective body armor, shot his way into the LGBTQ+ nightclub. The attack took place the night of November 19, 2022, the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance. (Facing hate crime charges, the killer claimed after their arrest to identify as non-binary, but no acquaintances or family remember them so identifying before that.)

Colorado Springs is in Congressbanshee Boebert's district, so she dutifully issued the tweet I summarized within her Christmas card of the previous year.

You may have noticed that I didn't have a mass shooting cartoon for 2020; so here's an extra one from 2022 — because I've drawn more than one cartoon about mass shootings almost every year:

May, 2022

Americans were shocked by the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, in the spring of 2022, despite mass shootings having become commonplace in this country. While Uvalde police dithered around Robb Elementary School for over an hour, an 18-year-old with an assault rifle and black body armor went from room to room, methodically shooting children and staff. Children had to pretend they were dead as he returned to rooms he had left, shooting the wounded and anyone who called for help. 19 children and two teachers died before Border Control agents stormed the school and shot their murderer.

As in the aftermath of other school shootings, there was much talk by opponents of gun control of "hardening" our schools — making them impenetrable to mass murderers and just about everybody else. The nitwit Senator from my home state, on the other hand, went on TV to prescribe getting rid of "wokeness" and Critical Race Theory.

For the record: the Uvalde killer entered Robb Elementary through a locked door that failed to latch; and Critical Race Theory has never been part of the curriculum for schoolchildren in Uvalde or anywhere else.

April, 2023

Congresscretin Tim Burchett (R-TN) responded to the April, 2023 massacre of six schoolchildren and staff in Nashville, saying, "It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’"

September, 2024

There were some 50 or so school shootings in 2024, but what most concerned presidential candidate Donald The Terrible Trump was his bonkers delusion that kids were going to school and undergoing gender reassignment surgery in the nurse's office. (JD Vance's presence in my cartoon references an awkward campaign photo op in a doughnut shop.)

But yes, Trump literally did respond to a mass shooting in Iowa, in which a sixth grader was killed, with "It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it."

I nearly pulled this cartoon, drawn the same weekend that a bullet supposedly grazed Trump's ear at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. He got over it — you and I have had worse paper cuts — but his loyal minions spent the next week wearing gauze over the sympathetic injuries to their own right ears.

💭🙏

I'm afraid I don't have any witty remarks to wrap up this week's Graphical History Tour. No words of encouragement. No easy answers. 

Just the Gun Violence Archive map of mass shootings so far this year.