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: 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.

Toon: American Horror Story

Sunday night, a 64-year-old white male with an arsenal of assault weapons barricaded himself in a 32nd-floor room of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, broke through a window or two and opened fire on thousands of people attending an open air concert across the street. As of this morning, the death toll stands at 59; 527 others were injured in the shooting and resulting panic.

Congress, out of respect to the dead and maimed, plans to lead the nation in a moment of silencers.

The above cartoon won't show up on the AAEC web site until tomorrow, but I decided to break with my usual practice and post it here today. If I had waited a little longer to draw this cartoon, I could have featured disgraced Fox "News" star Bill O'Reilly instead of NRA Ghoul In Chief Wayne LaPierre:

"[H]aving covered scores of gun-related crimes over the years, I can tell you that government restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people.
They will find a way. ....
This is the price of freedom.  Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.
The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection.  Even the loons."

Mr. Trump called the Las Vegas massacre an act of "pure evil."

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." — Edmund Burke

Look Who's Speaking

After two consecutive cartoons featuring Trump administration flacks, Spokespersonback Saturday takes a brief moment to recall mouthpieces of the past.

Brief, because I haven't drawn many cartoons about them.

Not that their faces aren't well known; but I'm usually more interested in highlighting the presidents rather than the schlubs who have to speak for them. But sometimes I want to populate a cartoon with assorted administration figures, or to have someone else speak for the President.

The latter was the case in this 1985 cartoon of Ronald Reagan's Acting Press Secretary, Larry Speakes.

An adversarial relationship between an administration and the White House press corps, as you see,  is nothing new.

I just want to note what an apt name Larry Speakes had for a spokesperson. It's as if he were born to have that job. I can imagine that the family name derived from a long line of Speakespersons for medieval kings and princelings.

There wouldn't be another Press Secretary so aptly named until Barack Obama appointed Josh Earnest, whose name literally means "Just Kidding, But Seriously."

Another item to note is that Speakes, and his immediate successor, Marlin Fitzwater, were "Acting" or "Deputy" Press Secretaries. James Brady was officially kept on in the position of Press Secretary throughout the Reagan administration, in spite of having suffered severe brain injury in John Hinckley, Jr.'s  assassination attempt on the President only two months into the job. (Fitzwater continued as full-fledged Press Secretary in the George H.W. Bush administration.)

Technically, then, Brady was not still Press Secretary when the "Brady Bill" (officially the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act) passed the Congress and was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, prompting this cartoon:

The importance of Brady Act in ending Democrats' domination of Congress cannot be understated. Republicans took over both houses in 1994 with loud support of the National Rifle Association in key races. During the George W. Bush administration, with Republicans in charge of the legislative and executive branches of government, hey systematically gutted one firearm safety measure after another. With that monopoly of power again today, in fact, the NRA and its minions in Congress and the White House even want to make sure that mentally unstable Americans have free and easy access to guns.

Just like NRA poster boy John Hinckley, Jr., who is a free man these days.

Mr. Brady is no longer available to comment.

Q Toon: Danse Macabre

On the evening after the Orlando massacre at Pulse, Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California told his congregation:

"Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today? Um, no, I think that's great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight. ... There’s no tragedy,...I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out.” 

After a terrorist attack, you expect the nut jobs at the Westboro Baptist Church to crawl out of their cesspool to insult the victims. When the victims are LGB or T, the Westboro cult has its share of company among so-called Christians.

"The left is having a dilemma of major proportions and I think for those of us who disagree with some of their policies, the best thing to do is to sit on the sidelines and let them kill themselves.” -- Pat Robertson, 700 Club, Christian Broadcasting Network

"The good news is that there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world, because, you know, these homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles. That’s who was a victim here, are a bunch of, just, disgusting homosexuals at a gay bar, okay? Obviously, it’s not right for somebody to just, you know, shoot up the place, because that’s not going through the proper channels. But these people all should have been killed, anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels, as in they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed." -- Pastor Steven Anderson, Faithful Word Baptist Church, Arizona

“These 50 sodomites are all perverts and pedophiles, and they are the scum of the earth, and the earth is a little bit better place now. And I’ll take it a step further, because I heard on the news today, that there are still several dozen of these queers in ICU and intensive care. And I will pray to God like I did this morning, I will do it tonight, I’ll pray that God will finish the job that that man started, and he will end their life, and by tomorrow morning they will all be burning in hell, just like the rest of them, so that they don’t get any more opportunity to go out and hurt little children.” Pastor Donnie Romero, Stedfast Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas

Meanwhile, in Buford, Georgia, someone decided to spray paint over a hate message against gays and transgender persons that had been out front of The Back to the Bible Holiness Church for weeks before the massacre. Pastor Bobby Weeks bizarrely claimed that "I haven’t cursed anyone. I haven’t called anyone a name" with his sign which read "God created man and woman. Satan created gays and transgender." He further claimed that everyone is "welcome" in his church.

I suspect that the vandals possessed the same degree of restraint, love, and charity as Mr. Weeks.

Q Toon: The Grim Sower

Today's cartoon uses a very peripheral sidebar to the Orlando massacre to comment on an aspect that isn't at all peripheral. But to begin with, the antiLGBT Lieutenant Governor of Texas tweeted the text of Galatians 6:7 on Sunday morning after the Orlando nightclub massacre. He deleted the tweet later that day, explaining that he didn't mean to say what it seemed to say about the terrorist victims.

If the gun-lovers in this country refuse to connect the dots between easy access to weapons of mass murder and mass murder itself, terrorists are more than happy to connect those dots.

I've seen plenty of arguments that the real issue is not assault weapons, and Republicans immediately looked for other ways to frame the issue. Donald Trump wasted no time congratulating himself for having called for quarantining the nation indefinitely (yeah, right: "until we figure out what's going on"). And Ron Johnson, Wisconsin's sorry excuse for a Senior Senator was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN this week:

“The AR-15 that was used in this terror attack, killing 49 people, you wouldn’t describe that as an assault weapon?” Blitzer asked. “You’re differentiating between that and a fully automatic assault weapon? Because that weapon certainly did kill a lot of people.”
“So do bombs,” Johnson replied. “So there are other ways that terrorists can slaughter people. It’s their ideology. Their ideology calls for the slaughter of innocents. That’s the root cause. It’s not law-abiding gun owners that are the problem here, it’s Islamic terrorists.”

Republicans have decided that real problem is that President Obama refuses to utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism." But even if saying "radical Islamic terrorism" somehow had a Rumpelstiltskin effect against those who inspired the slaughter in San Bernardino and Orlando, we'd still have the radical Christian terrorists who inspired the slaughter in Charleston and Oak Creek. And all the radical gun-worshiping terrorists from Littleton to Sandy Hook in order categorical.

There is a meme going around which attempts to counter the NRA argument that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" with a photograph pointing out all the armed "good guys" around President Ronald Reagan just before he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr. It somewhat misses the point in that Hinckley was indeed stopped by some of those good guys — after he had wounded four people, yes, but he did get stopped.

Hinckley was armed with a .22 caliber Röhm RG-14, and only hit Reagan at all because one of his six bullets ricocheted. Had he been able to get his hands on a a SIG Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle, or any of the other assault weapons made readily available to "bad guys" since 2004, Ronald Reagan's presidency would have been a historical footnote tucked between those of William Henry Harrison and James Abram Garfield, and there would probably be a monument somewhere in memory of many "good guys," photographers, and by-standers who were in front of the Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981.

Support Your Right to Explode

Dateline Shigagowinj, WI (IPU): At the National Rifle Association and Wisconsin Wisconsin Firearm Owners, Ranges, Clubs, and Educators Inc. (FORCE)  annual convention in Weston this month, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) signed a bill into law that allows suicide vests, five years after the state approved concealed firearms and seconds after a bill to allow carrying switchblades.

Manufacturing, selling, transporting, purchasing or possessing a suicide vest has been illegal in

Wisconsin since frontier days.

The bill also lowers the minimum age for wearing a suicide vest to three months and bars local governments from enacting suicide vest regulations stricter than state law.

The bill’s author, Kathleen Van Kooykmir (R-Idiculous) told reporters, “Local ordinances more restrictive than state law only serve to confuse or entrap law-abiding citizens traveling within or through the state. Preemption ensures that citizens can expect consistent enforcement of state suicide vest laws everywhere in Wisconsin.”

Suicide vests may now be worn in Wisconsin schools, houses of worship, bars, restaurants, sports arenas, public transportation, airports and amusement parks. The one place suicide vests will still be banned is the state capitol building.

“We may be wild and reckless,” said State Senator Ron Onionson (R-Eilavac), “But we ain't nuts.”

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

This graph showed up on a friend's Facebook page after the Umpqua Community College shooting:

I can't tell you how relieved I am to learn that mass shootings are not a problem! So President Obama has had to find something to say to the nation about fifteen mass shootings during his presidency, and residents of our inner cities aren't safe from stray bullets from the street piercing their walls and children -- it's not as if murder is overtaking old age as a major cause of deaths in this country.

Although, perhaps, if gun murderers get on the ball and boost their numbers up to rival All Cancers Put Together, the murder rate will start to eat into the NRA's profit margin enough that even Jeb! Bush will begin to show some concern.

(Meanwhile, here are some statistics from The Guardian that won't fit in this blog post.)

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.

Undue Burden Cartoon Published

I've just received a copy of a book by Steve Freeman, Guns in America: Common Sense vs. Nonsense, which includes one of my cartoons. The book was written out of a sense of frustration with the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass the Toomey-Manchin bill after a gunman slaughtered twenty kindergartners and first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

The author starts out his book description at amazon.com with a complaint about pro-gun reviewers slamming his book:

"IMPORTANT NOTE: Please ignore some reviews. The pro-gunners (anti-gun control crowd) have been planting negative reviews- one star- from the very beginning. They haven’t ordered or read the book, but this is what they do. The person who first did it (or organized it) discredited himself by planting the first 4 on the same day. Let’s play fair. At least read the book. Thanks."

He also notes in his letter to me that these people cannot possibly have read his book, since he knows personally all but two of the people who have bought his book to date. And, yes, I think we can safely ignore the review that puts "book" in quotation marks to indicate that, somehow, it isn't one. Sadly, I have to agree with one of the first several reviewers that the book lacks documentation -- the footnotes that any self-respecting work of non-fiction ought to have.

On the other hand, I welcome appreciation of editorial cartoon as a form of commentary. Other cartoonists in the book are Steve Greenberg, Bruce Plante, Robert Ariail and Kate Salley Palmer, and we are all properly credited.