Another Day in America

This week's Stepback Saturday is sparked by yet another episode of America's Well-Regulated Militia run amok.

I could start this review of my old cartoons of previous gun murders anywhere, but I'm going to start with this one from March, 1996.

The National Rifle Association and its stooges in all levels of government often respond to any call for gun control with the tiresome and disingenuous trope that if we'd only just enforce the gun control laws that we already have, yadda, yadda, yadda. What action they have taken, however, is to repeal as many of those already existing laws as they can, and to defund enforcement of the laws that remain.

In April, 1999, two well-regulated militia high school students tucked an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons under their trench coats and put Columbine High School on the map.

Mass shootings at the workplace were already old hat by this time. If a sentence includes the word "disgruntled," you can be sure that it also includes a body count.

Numbers of casualties alone should not be the only thing that shocks us. This cartoon from March, 2000 was occasioned by the shooting of a very young girl by a very young boy. I forget whether the lad knew he had a real, loaded gun or not. If this had been the only time such a tragedy had ever happened, I'm sure that you and I would both remember the details.

When I first decided upon the theme of this blog entry, I thought I might only have a few cartoons to choose from, since most of the cartoons I've drawn in the current millennium have been for the Milwaukee Business Journal and the gay press, and gun violence isn't a prominent issue for either of them. Since the Beej no longer wanted my cartoons by the time a neo-Nazi shot up the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek in 2012, I drew no cartoons on gun violence for them; but it turns out that I've drawn too many cartoons for Q Syndicate about gun fatalities to include all of them today.

The inspiration behind this cartoon was a widely published photo of a middle school student who was shot at his school; in the photo, he had a caterpillar in his hand.  If a fellow student had not decided that bringing a gun to school and shooting a classmate in the back of the head was the most appropriate response to unwanted advances, Lawrence King would be 22 now.

My intention was not to include the names of the gunmen in these incidents, but I can't avoid it in the case of a drifter who claimed that a lifetime of teasing over his last name was the reason that he sought out a crowded Roanoke, Virginia gay bar and started shooting.

I bring up this particular case in part because of the coincidence that a shooting 15 years later in Roanoke, on live television, seems to have inspired the Umpqua Community College shooter to aspire to the same sort of lasting infamy. Yet, unless you have some close connection to the Roanoke gay community, I'll bet you had totally forgotten all about Mr. Gay.

There was no LGBT connection to the mass shooting at the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre...

...at least not for most of us. But some people are determined that guns have nothing to do with gun violence, and will blame anything, anything, ANYTHING else.

And the beat goes on.

This Week's Toon: Gqhadđaƒphįyee

Well, that's just silly.

Or is it?

The lawyers for Brandon McInerney, the boy who shot and killed fellow student Lawrence King amidst an entire classroom of kids, successfully achieved a hung jury by use of the "Gay Panic Defense" -- that is, the idea that killing someone can be excused if the deceased is the same sex as the killer and thought that the killer was cute. This transfers all blame for the crime onto the victim, and transfers all victimhood onto the killer.

(Important: this only applies in the case of same-sex attraction. A gal is not allowed to kill a guy who asks her out on date, no matter how much of a creep she thinks he is. Creeps like him go on to become influential businessmen, lawyers, congressmen, and AM talk radio hosts who look out for the interests of their fellow creeps.)

The gay panic, blame-the-victim narrative appeared in the initial Associated Press account of the murder:

"Larry King was a gay eighth-grader who used to come to school in makeup, high heels and earrings. And when the other boys made fun of him, he would boldly tease them right back by flirting with them.
"That may have been what got him killed."

And somehow, in spite of the undisputed facts that McInerney told a friend the day before the shooting that he intended to kill King, that McInerney brought his father's gun to school, that McInerney sat down in the seat behind King (who didn't happen to be wearing any makeup, high heels or earrings that day), waited 20 minutes and then shot King in the back of the head at point blank range, the jury couldn't agree whether this was murder in the first degree or not.

So is it so silly to think that Muammar el-Qaddafi might try the same tack? It would at least garner him the sympathy of some in the religious right who have leapt to McInerney's defense.

Michael Brown, founder of ICN ministries ("Israel, the Church and Nations"), blamed gay activism in general:

"Some of the teachers in Larry's school, along with his adoptive father, specifically accused former assistant principal Joy Epstein, an open lesbian, of encouraging Larry's flamboyant behavior in order to promote her 'agenda.' If there is any truth to this, it is not just irresponsible, it is reprehensible. (At the least, there is no indication that she discouraged his pushy, sexual behavior.) ... It is true that Brandon McInerney murdered Larry King in cold blood, but gay activism is complicit in his death.

(By the way, who could Brown be quoting with that "agenda" crack? Not Ms. Epstein, I bet.)

Consider Tim Ravndal, the Tea Party leader in Montana who complained on Facebook that America is no longer America because you can't kill homosexuals at will any more and asked for an instruction manual on how Matthew Shepard was killed. (At least Ravndal was forced to resign.) Conservatives from North Carolina Congressman Virginia Foxx to presidential candidate Michele Bachmann argued against the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes act on the grounds that criminalizing assault and murder of LGBT people is an infringement of free speech.

* * *

When Chris saw this cartoon, his first question was whether Qaddafi had really said that the people he has killed are gay. When there are stories like that of the Catholic woman who is afraid to leave her house for fear that her children will see same-sex couples, it can be hard to tell fact from exaggeration. My convention for real news stories is to have "News Item:" in front of the caption. Perhaps captions such as this week's need to be prefaced with "Might Be an Onion News Item."