My, My, July

We've got more stuff from the Bergetoons vault in today's Graphical History Tour. 

You'll have to pardon me for indulging in rehashing my own cartoons three Saturdays in a row; in my defense, we had two prominent Senators knocking on death's door this month, and I didn't find much inspiration in cartoons published 100 Julys ago. "Oliphant's Presidents" has already been done (although I suppose I could have tried putting an "Oliphant's Vice Presidents" thing together).  

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., July 1986

The cartoons I drew for the NorthCountry Journal directly reflected the editorials in each monthly issue. This one had to do with 44 Wisconsin conservation clubs joining with the Wildlife Legislative Fund of America, a pro-hunting lobbying group, to "defeat the anti-hunting movement before it defeats us," according to WLFA chair Jim Glass. 

The NorthCountry Journal reported that the WLFA was funded by grants from Woodstream Corporation (makers of Victor traps), the fur industry, the Mellon Foundation, and national sportsmen organizations.

The WLFA had chosen Wisconsin as the pilot program for its "Protect What's Right" campaign because "if it doesn't fly in Wisconsin, it's not going to fly at all," said Glass, a Rockwell International executive from Columbus, Ohio. Wisconsin has a very strong and long-standing hunting tradition; I don't recall it ever being a hotbed of anti-hunting legislation. 

In fact, the legislation I do recall includes a 2003 constitutional amendment guaranteeing right to hunt and fish.

1996

"Our Problem" in Journal Times, Racine Wis., July 7, 1996

This cartoon expands on an neighbors' successful fight to block a proposed halfway house for offenders who had served their prison sentence (see the unpublished local cartoon posted back in May), as well as Racine taxpayers' objection to a .1% sales tax in Milwaukee and adjacent counties to help pay for the Brewers' new baseball stadium. The stadium tax had prompted a recall of a Republican member of the State Senate from Racine, which would result in flipping the State Senate to a Democratic majority.

The upscale North Bay neighborhood was up in arms against having a home for developmentally challenged adults nearby, successfully blocking that proposal, too. Complaints against property taxes funding the public schools coming from retirees whose children had graduated has been a never ending constant as far back as I can remember.

A letter to the editor responding to my cartoon argued a distinction between schools and the halfway homes on the one hand and the baseball stadium on the other. "Homes for the mentally retarded, prisons, and schools are all public problems," Annette Richie wrote. "Baseball is a private enterprise and should not be subsidized by citizens' tax dollars."

It's an argument with merit, but without a successful track record.

By the way, every little bit of that cartoon, including the diagonal line shading, I drew by hand. So don't give me that "AI Is Art, Too" crap.

2006

July, 2006

So now we turn from the local stuff to the gay stuff.

You wouldn't know it these days, but July used to be a lull in the news cycle. I can't recall whether I drew this cartoon in response to any specific gay celebrity getting caught with his pants down, or if I came up with it when there wasn't anything current in the news to draw about.

This was before Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) got arrested for lewd conduct in a rest room at the Twin Cities International Airport, after which late night comedians were guaranteed a laugh by citing the airport or inserting the words "wide stance" in a punch line. Years earlier, George Michael's public loo escapades had been fodder for fallback punch lines.

2016

July, 2016

I drew this cartoon a little too late for most LGBTQ Pride events. A number of Pride parades in the U.S. and Canada had been disrupted by protesters from within our community who objected to other the inclusion of certain other LGBTQ subgroups.

Toronto Pride had assigned the lead spot in their parade to the local Black Lives Matter group, which returned the favor by blocking the parade, setting off multi-colored smoke bombs, and refusing to move until a list of demands was met, including the removal of police from the parade ‒ both as participants and as protection.

The subgroups mentioned in later panels have not, so far as I know, gone quite so far as to disrupt Pride parades in progress. The objections raised by Palestinian, Jewish, animal rights activist, anti-corporate, and anti-religious LGBTQ groups, however, have been real. 

The overt hostility and persecution by Republicans running state and federal government has probably tempered any such controversies this year — except for either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

Not that everything went smoothly this year. Police aggressively attacked people in Philadelphia's Gayborhood during that city's Pride festival. https://epgn.com/2026/06/09/community-responds-to-gayborhood-police-presence-pride/

Dallas Pride Board officials have been accused of embezzling funds and financial mismanagement

sponsors withdrawing support https://blog.presspassq.gay/2026/07/pride-celebrations-marred-by-controversies-cuts-in-funding.html

June Toons

Today's Graphical History Tour head down into the Bergetoon vaults in search of cartoons from ten, twenty, thirty, and forty Junes ago. 

2016

June, 2016

I noticed that the Philadelphia Gay News, which usually runs my cartoons in grayscale, chose to print my Barney Frank tribute cartoon in full color in their annual Pride issue currently on newsstands. I did offer a grayscale version of it, which I did not do for the cartoon I drew ten years ago this week in response to the Pulse nightclub massacre.

Rainbows do not translate well into grayscale or black-and-white. For the first 16 years or so when I began drawing for the LGBTQ+ press, I didn't incorporate color except for special projects. At first, whenever I put a rainbow flag in a cartoon, I could only suggest the colors by drawing six shades of cross-hatching. Around 2005, I started employing computer-generated halftones in my work, but it was another seven years before I began regularly colorizing my drawings.

Changing the mood entirely:

2006

for Q Syndicate, June, 2006

Some guys just aren't second date material. And some other guys just don't know how to break it to them.

The non-topical nature of this cartoon suggests to me that although I drew it in June, it may have been sent to Q Syndicate as a reserve for a later date when I might be on vacation or any other reason miss deadline.

So I assume it was published sooner or later, because if it is still languishing in the retired computer back-up files at syndicate offices, I ought to change the Q in the final panel to an N in order to keep it relevant.

1996

June, 1996

Here's a cartoon I drew for the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee student newspaper, the UWM Post, and drove it up to their office only to discover that they had no plans to publish during summer break.

Previously, the Post put out three issues each summer, publishing biweekly instead of its regular semiweekly schedule.

As for the content of the cartoon: Sen. Bob Dole, having secured the Republican presidential nomination with a record of supporting the party priority of criminalizing abortion, now sought to appeal to supporters of abortion rights. Not by softening his position on reproductive rights, but by welcoming the support of pro-choice Americans willing to have that choice taken away from them.

Standing behind Dole in this cartoon are House Majority Leader Dick Armey, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Senators Phil Gramm and Jesse Helms, and theocratic activists Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed.

1986

June, 1986

Speaking of cartoons that never saw print, I have not been able to determine whether or where this cartoon might have been published. It stars my congressman, Les Aspin, after he had voted in favor of President Reagan's military aid package for the right-wing Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras.

Aspin's vote stunned liberals at home and in Washington. Elected on a peacenik platform during the Vietnam War in 1970, his prior experience in the Pentagon garnered him the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee in 1985.

I populated this cartoon with a number of actual Democratic politicians: I can be certain of Alan Cranston, Daniel Inouye, Majority Leader Jim Wright, House Speaker Tip O'Neil, 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, and future President Joe Biden (which means that I was wrong about when I first drew him according to this Graphical History Stop). Some that I'm less sure of might be Representatives Barbara Mikulski and Dick Gephardt, Party Chair Paul Kirk, and Senator Robert Byrd.

Jumping back to 2016, I'd like to end up with a cartoon that I'm fairly certain got published somewhere.

for Q Syndicate, June, 2016

Republicans' mythical Big Tent popped up in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, when he claimed to have great support among the LGBT community while simultaneously wooing the antigay evangelical vote that had become so critical to becoming a GOP nominee. Since then, the evangelicals have bowed before the Baal of Trumpism, ceding their dominance to the oligarchs and broligarchs, Nazis and apartheiders.

By the way, I couldn't find the file of the colorized version of the Friends with Benefits cartoon, so I've recolored the original scan. I probably didn't originally paint Trump's face orange like I do now, since I also hadn't drawn tiny hands or the overlong necktie in this cartoon. The pig snout came a bit later.

Now, I don't know what LGBT supporters Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee at this point, had in mind, aside from Ric Grenell, Scott Bessent, Milos Yiannopoulos, and Caitlyn Jenner. But Trump's campaign message after the Pulse Nightclub massacre was that Hillary Clinton would "bring[] in more people who will threaten your freedoms and beliefs" (his tweet). He also told an audience in Atlanta: 

"The LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community — they are so much in favor of what I've been saying over the last three or four days. Ask the gays what they think and what they do, in, not only Saudi Arabia, but many of these countries, and then you tell me — who's your friend, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?"

This ties in, not just to the cartoon at the top of today's post, but also to the Bob Dole cartoon. I doubt that Dole, or any of the guys drawn behind him, seriously thought that he had fans of the pro-choice persuasion. Inviting them to vote Republican was just one of those things politicians used to do even in the days when we were sorting ourselves into irreconcilable adversaries.

But one does get the impression that Donald Trump lives in a fantasy world where facts become true (or crooked) simply because he says so. He hears the LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community agreeing with him in his head, so they must be his bigliest friends, that he can tell you.

Ditto the adulating crowds at Madison Square Garden, the praise for his gilded ballroom, any number of big men who have come up to him with tears in their eyes, and those peace negotiations about to bring Iran's surrender any minute now.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I did not draw about the latest abortive assassination attempt at the White House Press Corps Dinner last night.

The story does not have an expressly LGBTQ+ angle (well, at least I hope it doesn't), and the only way I could imagine coming up with an editorial cartoon tailored to the LGBTQ+ press about it would be to have a Max & Leo episode in which Leo falls for the notion that it was some sort of staged hoax. And I intend for Leo to be a liberal, but not a gullible one.

Oh, I suppose I could have come up with some brand new LGBTQ or + character watching Breaking News coverage on TV, but we're bound to learn something completely different about the gunman by Thursday rendering moot whatever bon mot I might have them say. We've already gone through the incident being used to promote Trump's Gaudy Ballroom, to Norah O'Donnell asking Trump about the gunmanifesto ranting about a pedophile rapist, to social media debating whether the guy is a registered Republican, Democrat, floor wax, or dessert topping.

Saturday Selfies

It's time once again for the Graphical History Tour  to venture down into the deep recesses of your friendly tour guide's basement to rummage through some April cartoons decades old.

Starting with—

1986

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., April 28, 1986

Just five years after a mentally deranged person attempted to assassinate the President of the United States, Congress, with the full support of that assassination target, decided it was time to relax gun controls. 

The so-called Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 amended the Gun Control Act of 1968 to redefine "gun dealer," excluding those making occasional sales or repairs, and legalized interstate sales of firearms provided that seller and buyer meet in person.

Another provision of the Act prohibited "the establishment of any system of registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions."

On the other hand, it did add penalties for the use of armor-piercing bullets during the commission of a crime involving illegal drugs.

1996

Gun rights in this country depend to some extent on one's socio-economic status.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 18, 1996

Nowadays, the Citizen's Militia types even get presidential pardons and Justice Department pressure on judges to vacate seditious conspiracy convictions for trying to overthrow the U.S. government.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 22, 1996

Speaking of eternal constants, consider the plight of poor, cursed Lebanon. Once considered the Paris of the Middle East, capital Beirut was ripped apart by a sectarian religious war in the 1970's and pummeling by its neighbor to the south, Israel.

The main difference between then and now is that Shimon Peres appeared to have genuine regret at the death and destruction, whereas the Netanyahu government seems to revel in it. Targeting ambulances, schools, journalists, and hospitals all seems entirely intentional now.

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where this cartoon was printed, has long had Islamic and Jewish student groups very vocal about matters involving Israel, Palestine, and their neighbors. I might have expected some blowback over this cartoon, but the next issue's letter to the editor from the Israel Activist Center defending Israel's actions made no mention of my cartoon. 

Nor did the counter-response from the President of the Collective Union of Arab Students a week later. And with that, the school year ended, and any further salvos in the conversation went up on some long forgotten BBS.

2006

for Q Syndicate, April, 2006

Donald Trump, Eric Swalwell, and Tony Gonzales most certainly did not invent sex scandals. One such scandal, quickly forgotten among the parade, involved sexting of underage girls by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle.

55-year-old Doyle, believing he was sexting with a girl of 14, was caught in an on-line sting by the Polk County, Florida, Sheriffs Department. Charged with sending the fictitious girl sexually explicit photos and movie clips, Doyle had even given her his name, that he worked for DHS, and his office and governmental cell phone numbers.

This embarrassment came on top of the department's woefully inadequate response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and the revelation that someone at DHS had disposed of an envelope of suspicious white powder out an office window. (There had been a few incidents of envelopes being mailed to news anchors and Democratic politicians made to appear as though they contained a toxic chemical.)

Going for a Three Stooges reference here was complicated by the fact that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff bore no resemblance to Larry, Moe, or Curly. I do think that I got his caricature down in this, the one and only time I ever put him (or Brian Doyle, for that matter) in a cartoon.

2016

for Q Syndicate, April, 2016

I haven't set a cartoon in a diner in a long time, which is too bad. I like the setting, with its possibilities for slightly altering the point of view. 

In the years before I started colorizing my cartoons, the second or third panel would have probably shown this couple in silhouette. It keeps the cartoon from being too static, since the characters aren't actually moving around doing things.

The situation also allows for this sort of twist ending in a way that, say, talking heads on Fox Noise might not.

Q Toon: P.S., You're Fired

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, media from his side of the aisle leapt to the conclusion that his killer must be some leftist transgender anti-gun immigrant tree hugger from Berkeley. And, fess up, you thought so, too.

He turned out to be an ammosexual son of a local sheriff, raised Mormon, who etched right-wing mottos on the bullets he shot. 

Or maybe he didn't. Maybe he's got a transgender roommate and got converted to socialism during his one semester at college before dropping out to attend trade school instead. But the transgender roommate has been helpful to police — although I wouldn't be surprised these days if the transgender roommate turns out to be as real as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

The way the media bubbles of the left and the right have become so self-contained, Schrödinger's Assassin can be whoever you preconceive him to be. He's a disciple of Nick Fuentes. He's a card-carrying liberal thanks to a single semester at Utah State. He's Death Wish and Robocop. He's Crying Game and Brokeback Mountain.

He's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

What he has become, without a doubt, is a convenient excuse for the present authoritarian regime to crack down on and criminalize free speech that does not conform to officially permissible thought.

From Absolutely Corrupt Premier Donald Berzelius Trump on down, this gilded White House and its congressional majority lackeys are now demanding the firing of anyone who dares question Charlie Kirk's sainthood, fails to demonstrate adequate grief, or appears in public without sackcloth and ashes. "They're already under major investigation," Trump told reporters, adding that he means "A lot of the people that you would traditionally say are on the left."

Vice President Shady Vance took time off from his vice presidential duties to guest host Kirk's podcast, telling his audience, "When you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out and, hell, call their employer."

Reichkulturkammer Stephen Miller threatened disloyal subjects, "The power of law enforcement under President Trump's leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power."

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suspended an Army colonel for a social media post critical of Kirk. Attorney General Pam Bondi went on Fox Noise to admonish private business, "And employers, you have to have an obligation to get rid of people... They shouldn't be working with you."

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who is running for governor, called on social media for the firings of an assistant dean at Middle Tennessee State University and professors at Austin Peay State University and Cumberland University. All three lost their jobs for comments deemed inappropriate for expressing a lack of sympathy, or even for expressing pleasure, in the shooting of Kirk. One said Kirk “spoke his fate into existence.” (PBS News)

MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd — a George W. Bush administration strategist — for opining that "Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions." Washington Post global opinions editor Karen Attiah got fired for quoting on her own social media account Kirk's statements demeaning Black women's "brain processing power." Not for celebrating Kirk's death, but for quoting him. Accurately.

PHNX Sports, an online sports news site focused on Arizona, announced the firing of reporter Gerald Bourguet after he said on social media on Wednesday, in a since-deleted post, that "Refusing to mourn a life devoted to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence." (CBS News)

And just yesterday, ABC pulled the plug on Jimmy Kimmel over Monday night's monologue.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said. He also poked fun at President Trump’s response to a question from the press about how he was mourning Kirk’s death after Trump pivoted to a discussion of the construction of a new White House ballroom.

First Colbert and now Kimmel? Oh, well. I've been staying up too late at night, anyway.

Outside of government, the press, jocks, educators, and comedians, the people fired for reacting to Kirk's death the way the Fornicate Your Feelings mob has responded to the deaths of George Floyd and the assault on Nancy Pelosi's husband have included fire fighters, restaurant managers, airline pilots, Nasdaq employees, and who knows how many more by the time the Ministry of Truth Social declares another thoughtcrime wave?

This Week's Sneak Peek

I intentionally did not add any commentary below the cartoon I posted on Friday evening. I wanted the cartoon to stand alone, and not have its impact diluted by my fretting that I had drawn the hand too large, or discussing how my first thought had been to put Charlie Kirk's own statement that "I think it's worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment" (April 5, 2023 at Talking Points USA Faith event, Awaken Church, Salt Lake City UT).

Having thought better of making the cartoon about that quotation, rather than join the crowd posting it all over the internets, I decided to address the cliché that follows so many major gun incidents (right after "thoughts and prayers") that "This Is Not Who We Are."

Clearly, it is who we have become.

Just the same, out of respect to Mr. Kirk, I am refraining from empathy for him, for his family, for his fans, and for his admirers.

He would have wanted it that way.

Toon: Can't Argue With That

 

This Week's Sneak Peek

The uptick in visits to your humble scribbler's blog keep coming, and now I'm worried that someone in the White House has stumbled upon my page.

In last week's cartoon, an unspecified Republican member of Congress floated the idea of banning gun ownership by transgender persons. I didn't want to attribute the idea to any particular congresscritter, because depriving any man, woman, child, or fetus of the right to bear arms is utter anathema to the party that believes that the Constitution begins and ends with the second half of the Second Amendment.

But lo and behold, some anonymous transphobe in Trump's White House has floated the very same idea in apparent seriousness. 

In the wake of the Minneapolis Catholic church shooting, senior Justice Department officials are weighing proposals to limit transgender people’s right to possess firearms, according to two officials familiar with the internal discussions.

The talks, described as preliminary in nature, appear to build on an idea that has gained some currency in conservative media...

Will the ammosexual community sit quietly for this blatant disregard of the Guns For All Amendment? Will the NRA sleep through a tyrannical government that they've warned everyone about for half a century finally showing up?

Yeah, probably.

By the way, according to Blogger, second place in the list of websites visited on viewers' way to my blog is no longer that of the burger chain. Now second place apparently is a website where Lwaxana Troi's manservant gets all his hardware, white goods, and garden supplies.

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.

Q Toon: A Familiar Target

My apologies for such a verbose cartoon this week. I might not have needed to include the explanation that the Republicans in the cartoon are discussing a response to the mass shooting of children attending mass at a Catholic private school in Minneapolis last week.

Except for the possibility that there would be another mass shooting by the time this cartoon reached the newsstands.

Right-wing media and politicians quickly latched onto reports that the gunman was an MtF transgender person. (I do not know the shooter's preferred pronouns; I will use feminine ones to refer to her, but use the word "gunman" as if it were gender-neutral.) Firing hundreds of rounds through the stained glass windows into Annunciation Catholic Church, the shooter then took her own life.

What relevance, if any, the gunman's gender identity had to do with the shooting one can only speculate, so speculate the right-wing media promptly did. 

What is clear is that she was a former student of the Catholic school, and that her mother once worked at the parish. The shooter left behind a some sort of  manifesto and numerous threats on line, including threats to do exactly what she did. 

“This is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message,” according to the killer's manifesto. “The message is there is no message.” 

The shooter's previous online posts evince a festering hatred of virtually everybody and everything — with the exception of mass murderers. Them she admired.

But transgender persons are Republicans' go-to scapegoat for murders these days (at least when the killer is white). Trumpster Obergruppenführer Sebastian Gorka was on CNN over the weekend pushing inflated numbers for transgender shooters in these mass shootings, mischaracterizing some specific gunmen as trans to do so.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) used the occasion to call on the state of Minnesota to repeal its transgender refuge law (which affords protections to caregivers and persons undergoing transgender therapy who might be threatened to extradition to a state where transgender therapy is illegal). Congressloon Emmer failed to explain how that law is relevant to the Annunciation shootings; the gunman did not flee to Minnesota from some red state Cisberry R.F.D. 

By the way, do you remember the white guy who assassinated a Minnesota legislator and her husband? Slimy Don Jr. went on TV to point the blame at transgender community despite the killer having publicly railed against the  LGBTQ+ community — transgender persons in particular. 

Well, at least Republicans haven't gotten around to blaming transgender people for measles outbreaks and forest fires. Those are still the fault of midichlorians and Jewish space lasers, last time I checked.

Q Toon: Graveside Manners

Shortly after I pitched this idea to my editors and sat down at my drawing board Sunday, I saw the news that yet another attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump by some deranged idiot equipped with weapons of mass casualty had been thwarted. I seriously considered hunting for some other topic for this week's cartoon; perhaps if some comment by Pete Buttigieg on Meet the Press had tickled my fancy, I would have found one.

Since I didn't, here's this one.

Trump's repeated insistence that somewhere in this glorious country, parents are sending their children off to school only to have the little tykes come home having been subjected to spontaneous gender reassignment surgery in the principal's office apparently falls under JD BH Vance's theory that it's okay "to create stories so that the American media actually [pay] attention."

The ReQublican Qandidates are remarkably less concerned with the very real instances of children going to school only to come home with mortal coil reassignment surgery performed by another one of those deranged idiots equipped with weapons of mass casualty. There have been two attempted assassinations of presidential candidates this year; as of September 6, there have been 46 mass shootings at schools in the United States in 2024.

And zero gender reassignment surgeries at any school anywhere in the country.

Right-wingers have been quick to accept Dear Leader's fairy tales, however, and to discount reality. They dismiss grieving parents as "crisis actors," so it's hardly surprising that some on the other side immediately spread wild conjecture on line that the Mar-a-Lagoon golf course wannabe sniper is also some sort of crisis actor, hired to distract the electorate from Trump's ridiculous debate performance, or Project 2025, or reports that inflation is down and employment is up.

And the Fox Noise Machine just as quickly answered that the guy was inspired by Democratic campaign warnings that Trump is a racist, a fascist, and danger to the Republic, just because Trump says racist, fascist things and promises to be a dictator on Day One.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's admonishment that "You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts" is so passé these days. Pick and choose whatever facts you fancy, tune out the rest, and believe whatever you want. The gunman is a Republican! He's a Democrat! He's a Ramaswamian! He's a Bernie Bro! He's a floor wax! He's a dessert topping! He's Schrödinger's assassin!

How long, O Lord, how long have we been coming here?

This Week's Sneak Peek

 You thought I was going to give this guy a pass?

On a totally unrelated matter:

I heard from a teacher in Georgia after last week's mass shooting at Apalachee High School that her school had received a bomb threat. Students and staff were told to evacuate the building.

Then the school administrators told teachers to go back in and search for anything that might be a bomb.

Think about that for a moment.

Clearly the school administrators didn't.

Think of your children's school teachers, and think back on any of your own. How many of them had any training in explosives detection? How many of them would be able to find a bomb hidden who knows where in a school building without setting it off?

Well, that's Miss Othmar all over.

Q Toon: Our Tone

There were a handful of celebrity deaths over the weekend, and I tried to come up with a cartoon about Richard Simmons's passing. But everything that came to mind was either trite or in poor taste — as most memorial cartoons are — and given that the assassination attempt against Donald Trump was dominating news coverage to the exclusion of almost everything else, I couldn't bring myself to ink Simmons doing calisthenics at the Pearly Gates.

Or whatever I might have had Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Shannon Daugherty, James Sikking, Shelley Duvall, or Jacoby Jones doing.

Because a bullied young white man with a gun climbed onto a roof and took shots at Mr. Trump, there have been calls to "tone down the rhetoric," especially regarding criticism of the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States.

Republicans do not like Democrats calling their presidential nominee an American Hitler and a reprehensible, cynical asshole (whoops, those were from J.D. Vance) just because he wants to create a police state to round up all the Latinos, weaponize the Department of Justice and FBI, set up boncentration bamps, and persecute all his political enemies, and he never met a right-wing dictator he didn't like. I get it. Imagine being called a Communist for wanting affordable health care, or a Nazi for supporting women’s rights, or demonspawn for urging people not to gather in crowds during a global pandemic of a novel virus that was killing millions.

Toning down the rhetoric is not something we political cartoonists are particularly good at, but you will notice that I didn't draw Mr. Trump with a pig's snout, and I have (so far) refrained from giving him a middle name from dystopian fiction.

For my cartoon, I selected five examples of Republicans loose talk about guns and killing. The first (a paraphrase) dates back to 2016; the fifth (a direct quote) was earlier this month. I could have included many more — especially Republicans' virulent rash of gun fetish Christmas cards. 

(I didn't leave myself room to identify the fourth politician, and it occurs to me that readers may not know whether she is Lauren Boebert, Sarah Palin, or Kristi Noem. Is there any one of them that you think could not have said she was bringing a gun to settle political differences?)

Trump's responses to, not just hypothetical or rhetorical, but actual violence against Democrats is unforgettable:

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

We're also told that he found the violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government on January 6, 2021, thoroughly entertaining. Most of the rest of us did not.

So forgive me if I'm not ready to sing For He's a Jolly Good Fellow with his MAGA mobsters.

✍

By the way, it was Rep. Lauren Boebert.

Q Toon: Rainbow Alert

The United States Department of State issued a warning earlier this month of the possibility of some sort of terror attack targeting LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations in June. They were not, however, terribly specific about it.

I don't visit their STEP page often enough to know whether the orange bar atop this notice means that they're still using the color-coded alert system created by the Dubya Bush administration. Orange was pretty serious, as I recall.

But then, it's also the color of road construction notices.

Today's cartoon is not to dismiss the State Department warning in any way. You may recall that the State Department issued a similar warning of a possible terrorist attack in Russia that was ignored by the Putin regime, only for Islamist terrorists to kill 140 people at a Moscow rock concert.

Rather, the threat of attack is something that LGBTQ+ people — the genderqueer particularly — live with every day. Not a month goes by without news of a transgender person or two being murdered somewhere in the U.S. So-called honor killings of LGBTQ persons by members of their own families happen around the world, even here in America. And it's only a matter of time until some gundamentalist crackpot picketing outside a Pride event somewhere in this country snaps.

The possibility has to be kept in mind when we have men of the actual cloth spewing stuff like this at city council meetings:

 David Lettau, pastor of Country Gospel Church, read a passage from Romans 1 about “uncleanness” and then related it to the Pride Festival.

“What they’re doing is teaching perversion to our children,” Lettau said. “We as a city are responsible for making sure that no decadent and perverse things go on.”

Lettau then made his threat explicit.

“It’s worthy of death, it says in the Bible,” Lettau said.

No one from the city council challenged his words.

Later, Pastor Jeff Combs of the First Community Church of God lamented that he was being lumped in with people who hate, especially as he has “nothing but love for people who live any lifestyle” and once “had a gay friend.” He then told the council they would be in violation of state law if they allowed juveniles to be allowed to attend Pride.

“We will pursue the matter further,” Combs threatened. “This is about protecting children.”

The pastor then, too, grounded his threat in the Bible, citing Luke 17:2, a passage that suggests drowning someone who adversely influences children.

“It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck,” Combs said. “So watch yourselves. We are called to watch over our children.”

If I were Pastor Combs's gay friend, I'd be leery of accepting any invitation to join him at the beach.

The danger comes not just from the Christian Right, of course. The current Israel-Gaza War has heightened fears that some jihadi will be inspired to lash out against a soft target such as a Pride festival. June of 2016 saw the massacre at Orlando's Pulse nightclub by a gunman who variously pledged allegiance to Islamic State and to Hezbollah. We remember also the ultra-orthodox Jew who attacked Jerusalem Pride festival-goers in 2005 with a knife — and again ten years later.

So should we cancel Pride this year?

For centuries, queer people have faced jail, dungeons, torture, muggings, burning at the stake, stoning, death camps, having brick walls dumped on us, hangings, knifings, shootings, ostracization and ridicule.

Yet we're still here. Because love finds a way.

And that's why we celebrate Pride.

Q Toon: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

If you were hoping to find my cartoon this week to be about something other than the Republican jihad against transgender persons, well, I hope you will settle for being 75% satisfied.

Since I drew this cartoon Sunday night, the nightly news has been able to give us breaking reports on Donald Berzelius Trump's sexual assault verdict and George Devolder Santos's fraud indictment, so Gay Homer there can be relieved that the news writers are not, in fact, on strike.

I tend to doubt that the $5 million civil judgment against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll suit does anything to lessen the possibility of a Trump-Biden rematch next year. It hasn't revealed anything about Trump that we, including his most devoted sycophants, didn't already know in November, 2016. Nor, not surprisingly, did his pathetic display of bullying arrogance on CNN last night.

Meanwhile, the AR-15 pandemic is still wreaking havoc across the country. Between one mass shooting and its resulting funerals, there are likely to be another dozen more mass shootings. And the political party in charge of most of the country's statehouses is firmly convinced that transgender people, wokeness, and critical race theory are the greater threats to life and limb.

With any luck, I'll be able to take a complete break with the issue of transgender persecution for at least one week, and present you with a cartoon about the freshman congresscretin from Long Island... even though that news story will be pretty old news by next Thursday.

At least I might not be competing for gags with the late night chat show writers.

At the Wrong Door

In yesterday's post, I commented that it has never occurred to my better half and me to shoot at people who turn around in our driveway or mistakenly ring our doorbell.

There was one episode that wasn't so innocuous when I lived in a downtown apartment.

I had a neighbor next door — I'll call him John, since that's what his parents did — who does not rank among my favorite neighbors.  He and his friends were into heroin, and I'm quite sure that his apartment was the source of the cockroaches that kept getting into my kitchen. (The statutes of limitations have run out on anything I'm about to post here; and by now, John and his friends have straightened up, served time, or overdosed.)

We shared a back porch off our adjacent kitchens.

One summer afternoon, I was watching TV in my living room. I had the kitchen door open on the latch to let the outside breeze through the apartment since I didn't have air conditioning, when I heard banging noises coming from the kitchen.

It was one of John's druggie friends trying to force the screen door open. I was furious confronting the guy, who backed off, saying that he had mistaken my door for John's. 

John, who wasn't home at the time, later apologized profusely to me for his friend's behavior, inviting me to party with them and offering to introduce me to one of his druggie friends who happened to be gay. Suffice it to say that I was not at all interested in any of it, up to and including the apology (which, at least, contained no blather about "continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards" or any such bullshit.)

All things considered, however, we were all alive to tell about it afterward because at no point in this story was there any gun involved.

Q Toon: America, We Hear You

Mass murders in the U.S. continue to outnumber the days on the calendar this year — a statistic made possible by the conjoined statistic that guns outnumber U.S. citizens.

The response by Republican lawmakers is epitomized by Tennessee Congresscretin Tim Burchett, who promised grieving parents after the massacre of six schoolchildren and staff in his state, "We're not going to fix it."

“It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it,” Burchett said. “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.’”

And also by the yahoos in the Nebraska legislature, who are poised to allow concealed carry without permit or gun safety training, thus voiding ordinances in Omaha and Lincoln.

Amid the daily carnage this month, the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Guns and cash exchanged hands in the parking lot with nary a thought given to whether either party to the transaction were a criminal, mentally unstable, a terrorist, or Gov. Kristi Noem's two-year-old kid.

Because, you see, as far as the NRA and its ammosexual fetishists are concerned, guns are not the problem; guns are the solution. And they'll be more than happy to sell you as many and whatever arms you think you need to protect yourself against their other customers.

As a result, in just the past week, two cheerleaders were shot in Texas when one of them got into a car she mistakenly thought was hers in a supermarket parking lot. We also had a scared shitless gun owner in Kansas City firing his gun through his front door and shooting in the head a 16-year-old boy who was supposed to pick up his little brother and sister and had rung the wrong doorbell. And some other shoot-first-think-later homeowner in upstate New York shot dead a 20-year-old woman in a car that was backing out of his driveway when the women in the car realized they weren't at the house of their friend.

Now, I've never had a stranger open my car door by mistake, but there's nothing at all unusual about people using our driveway to turn around instead of driving around the block. It's usually delivery people or neighbors' guests. If unwanted salespersons, or kids looking to earn money mowing lawns come to the door, we tell them we aren't interested, or sometimes we just ignore them.

But then, we don't belong to the NRA.