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.

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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.

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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.

Harden This

When Ted Cruz responded to the massacre at Robb Elementary School by saying schools need to be limited to a single entrance, I thought of my own elementary school. Four entry doors used by students, plus another to the gymnasium that was only used by staff and when the school was used as a polling place.

Locking four of those entrances doesn't seem too unreasonable, and has probably been done ever since Columbine 23 years ago.

Then I thought of my high school.

Washington Park High School is a sprawling complex, from the John Burns Park Theater to the fieldhouse (the dark building at the southeast end). Every one of the sidewalks in this satellite photo, including the one hidden by the "pin" over the theater building, leads to a door. There are at least two doors into the building from the parking lot on the west side of the building and another in that nearly enclosed area north of the fieldhouse. (That used to be a gated area where we could park bicycles and was a popular area for students who smoked. If there's still a gate, I can't see it in this photo.)

There are also doors to those enclosed courtyards, and there could well be other exterior doors I never needed, say, perhaps by the racetrack.

Point is, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that official policy is for only one of those doors to remain open during the school day.

I'd also be immensely surprised if everybody walked around the building to get to it every time they stepped out to their car, had outdoor gym class, or sneaked out for a smoke.

Q Toon: The New Kid

When I was a wee lad, September was all about going back to school. Nowadays, that's what August is all about, I guess. I'm never going to get used to that, but then, I don't have to. Except for planning my driving to avoid getting stopped by school buses every block or two.

Something else that's new these days is having to accommodate transgender students. If a kid felt his or her sex and gender didn't match, there was very little he or she could do about it if he or she wanted to make it to high school graduation in one piece. One couldn't expect any understanding from parents, teachers, administrators, or fellow students.

There are now some parents who are willing to understand and accommodate their transgender children. It's kind of a trend these days, perhaps going hand in hand with the trend of giving girls historically masculine names like Dylan, Ashley, and Addison. (There's no corresponding trend of giving boys historically feminine names; instead, boys are named for obsolete professions like Fletcher, Cooper, and Editorial Cartoonist.)

With more parents now being supportive of their transgender children, the onus then passes on to the teachers, administrators and fellow students to follow suit. Or risk ending up on the TV news — or worse: late-night TV and internet memedom.

Q Toon: Smokin' in the Boys' Room

Having to draw this week's cartoon days before Alabama Republicans went to the polls to nominate Baptist Inquisitor Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate, I had to find another topic (on the way, way, way outside chance that Alabama Republicans might join the 21st Century on Tuesday). I found it in Donald Joffrey Trump's nomination to a federal judgeship in Texas of another politician of Moore's ilk.

Jeff Mateer is a theocratic culture warrior in the Texas Attorney General's office who has preached that transgender schoolchildren are a sign of "Satan's plan."

"In Colorado, a public school has been sued because a first grader and I forget the sex, she's a girl who thinks she's a boy or a boy who thinks she's a girl, it's probably that, a boy who thinks she's a girl," Mateer said in a video posted on Vimeo in 2015 and reviewed by CNN's KFile. "And the school said, 'Well, she's not using the girl's restroom.' And so she has now sued to have a right to go in. Now, I submit to you, a parent of three children who are now young adults: a first grader really knows what their sexual identity? I mean, it just really shows you how Satan's plan is working and the destruction that's going on."

The link from the CNN page to Mateer's speech on Vimeo yields a "Sorry, we couldn't find that page" message, but there are other speeches in which the First Liberty Institute propagandist sermonizes about the persecution of conservative Christians who are forced to coexist against their will with LGBT persons.

In another speech, Mateer lamented that states have banned "conversion therapy," in which quack psychiatrists inspired by the Bible and A Clockwork Orange purport to turn LGBT victims straight. He believes that marriage equality will lead to people getting married to dogs, trees and summer breezes, and plenty of other such nonsense.

And he is not alone among Trump judicial appointees in such views. Matthew Kacsmaryk, nominated to another Texas district court, is a deputy general counsel to the First Liberty Institute. Leonard Grasz, nominated last month to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, is on the board of a Nebraska organization that defends conversion therapy.

Whatever Mr. Trump's personal beliefs on LGBT persons' rights may be, it is clear that the crew making judicial appointments for him are steadfastly antigay. And determined to stock the American courts system for decades to come with activist judges for whom the book of Leviticus always trumps the Constitution.

Q Toon: The Bully Pupil

It's Back To School time at Bergetoons Central!

From my vantage point as someone who remembers being bullied a couple of times in junior high school, anti-bullying policies in America's schools seem like a no-brainer. Kids have to go to school; they shouldn't have to put up with physical and mental abuse while they are there.

And yet, some people who call themselves Christians strongly disagree.

In Arizona, legislators had their anti-bullying bill teed up for passage in March [2012]. But then, Cathi Herrod, chief of a lobbying group associated with Focus on the Family, decided that the bill was really part of an effort to "force cultural acceptance and affirmation of homosexual lifestyles". Although the bill doesn't refer specifically to any one victimized group, Herrod successfully pressured lawmakers into rejecting it. Senate minority leader David Schapira, a sponsor of his Senate Bill 1462, called her a "legislative terrorist." "Cathi Herrod, an unelected lobbyist, killed a bill that would protect all Arizona kids purely because of her intolerance of gay kids," he said.
In Michigan [in 2011], the "anti-anti-bullying" lobby went on the offensive with some legislation of their own. In a bill dealing with the bullying issue, they inserted a provision that would have exempted bullies who acted out of "a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction". With an irony that seems more than usually cruel, the bill was named for a Michigan teen who had committed suicide after years of bullying.

Michigan ultimately cut the "Who Would Jesus Bully" exemption from its bill, but Christian groups continue to push other states to include it in theirs.

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) and Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) introduced the Student Non-Discrimination Act in the 111th Congress only to have it die in committee They have brought the bill back for consideration in the current Congress, but it appears doomed to the same fate.

Again, it's the Christian Right who came to the defense of bullies. Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, characterized the bill as an effort by then-Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools Kevin Jennings of to turn public schools in to NAMBLA orgy houses:

"When [Jennings] founded GLSEN, his idea of a safe school was one that pushed a radical homosexual agenda by even encouraging first and second-graders to engage in homosexual activity. So I think that's the impetus behind this bill. We have an administration that wants to push a radical social agenda."

To see what Safe Schools laws may be in effect in your state, see the Family Equality map.

Q Toon: A Night to Remember

Prom time is just about here, so I decided to take a break from the serious issues of the day this week.

I never actually went to prom when I was in high school, in spite of growing up in the town with the world's best prom. (That's how they bill it, really. Once upon a time, the Rotary Club brought in such superstars as Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, and Buddy Rich to play at the city-wide after-prom party they sponsor to keep kids under supervision and out of each other's pants; but after-proms with those big-name performers were well before my salad days. The Rotary Club dance continues to this day, however, with live cable TV coverage of the kids arriving in their finery.)

The last school dance I went to was in the eighth grade, where I discovered how grossly inadequate was the dance instruction that had been part of elementary school P.E.

I believe our prom theme was "A Stairway to Heaven" (wasn't everybody's?), and I can only assume that what paltry do-si-do and allemand-left skills I might have retained would be no more useful there than they had been in the eighth grade.

Back from vacation

I've been vacationing in Italy the past couple of weeks, but now I'm back. Here's this week's Q Syndicate cartoon:

For those who don't pay attention to right-wing media: Sean Hannity, the Washington Moon Star, Rush Limbaugh, and the usual Christianist lobbies have begun a smear campaign against "Safe Schools Czar" Kevin Jennings based on his career as an activist for LGBT issues in education. In particular, they are attempting to link Jennings to pedophilia through the tenuous argument that Jennings once praised gay rights pioneer Harry Hay, and Hay once expressed some support for including NAMBLA in the gay rights struggle.

Other smears include a discredited claim that Jennings once counseled a 15-year-old boy to continue a sexual relationship with an adult man, and criticism that Massachusetts safe sex materials included advice on fisting among various other sexual practices.

Here, Media Matters takes on right-wing smears of Kevin Jennings.

One other side note: Jennings's actual title is not "Czar" but "Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools." The position was created by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001; Jennings is the third person to hold the post, after Eric G. Andell and Deborah A. Price. He took office in July.