Don’t you just love a good political cartoon? This one’s by Tom Toles.
And another from Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur:
h/t: John, Linda Grilli
Two cartoons
June 13, 2014 • 9:51 am
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Whose turn is it to make the popcorn?
b&
Those are great!
I’ve long been a fan of Steve Benson’s work:
http://www.azcentral.com/topic/6D6C663F-0D13-43BB-B829-C6C738F2D109/
Benson, whose grandfather was a leader of the LDS church, had a very public loss of faith.
good ‘uns!
Is it possible the NRA can implode? I hope the latest fad of open carry continues. Pretty soon the portent of workplace violence will be indistinguishable from just some nutter wanting to re-establish his rights.
My wife has convinced me to stay apolitical on Facebook, so we will continue to be invited to dinner with my Republican fundamentalist Christian Texas in-laws… but it’s hard to suppress the rage at the flood of pro-gun posts every time a child is murdered for the crime of attending school or walking down the road. What a horrible cognitive dissonance that must pose for every opponent of sensible gun regulation.
The latest, and I can taste bile when I say this, is an accusation that CNN has inflated the number of children killed in school shootings… They reported 74 school shootings since Newtown (a number produced by ‘Everytown for Gun Safety’), when according to pro-gun sources, only 7 of those actually qualified as “school shootings” in the same category as Newtown. Imagine being relieved that only seven shootings met the strict definition of innocents being murdered!
‘Everytown for Gun Safety’ reports that 37 shootings on school grounds have occurred already this year. It’s a sad state of affairs when the guns have more representation in Congress than the families.
Do your Republican fundamentalist Christian Texan in-laws keep their politics off Facebook?
I suspect most gun nuts would claim that the American Revolution was an example of tyranny overthrown by armed individuals. But I guess a more accurate assessment would be that the Revolutionary War was fought by state militias and never would have succeeded without the armed support of France.
And we didn’t even need a 2nd amendment to win! But let’s give them a “one” in the tyrants overthrown column for King George. Still a bit lopsided.
And, of course, should it ever come to pass that we actually do need a second American revolution, there will be no lack of foreign (and domestic) arms dealers more than happy to supply us. Just as the first time around.
Not that much in the way of sophistication of arms is required. America, whose military is mightier than all the other militaries on the planet combined, is empirically incapable of actually conquering Afghanistan, one of the most impoverished countries on the planet.
Yes, we could turn the country into a glassed-over parking lot or loose any desired intermediate form of destruction upon the people and the land. But conquer them? Ha! Not a chance.
…see also Iraq…and Vietnam…and North Korea…and….
b&
Complementing Toles:
Check out Tom the Dancing Bug on GoComics!
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2014/06/13
Superb. Thanks!
Once the fall elections are over, I do hope Obama will devote/dedicate his last two yrs in office to forcing this issue.
On guns, there are very few voices of reason. There are the NRA and aligned voices on the right, who want to claim that guns can do no harm and should be carried by everyone everywhere. On the left, there are people who know virtually nothing about guns and have nothing but a visceral dislike of them to guide their views.
Neither group has any regard for facts.
The cold hard fact is, the US has a violence problem, not a gun violence problem. It’s unquestionable that magically erasing guns from existence would reduce violence (some violent events wouldn’t reach fruition in the absence of an efficient dispenser like guns), but it’s equally unquestionable that such magic does not exist. It’s also certain that most violent gun violence incidents would be still be violent events using another tool (knife, fire poker, explosive, etc.) if guns were to suddenly (again, magically) vanish.
There are many markers for arguments on the right that one recognize for the purpose of tuning out. If you hear “freedom” more than once, that’s a red flag. Ditto for “government” (especially if referred to as an entity, rather than a collection of people). The phrase “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, while absolutely true, is also a red flag.
On the left, the phrase “i don’t understand”, usually closely followed by some construction focusing on “need”, is a decent indicator that you’re dealing with a person who simply hates guns, and has no interest in a rational discussion. Discussions about “assault” rifles or magazine sizes should also make one wary.
I don’t agree with quite a few things that Sam Harris said on the topic, but he is the only prominent person I know of to actually voice an intelligent opinion about guns in the US. Everyone else seems bent on hewing to irrational party lines.
I’ve read a lot of comments by veterans of various wars who never fired a shot after coming home, and think there are far too many guns and gun nuts.
But what would they know, right? Ignorant and irrational, you betcha.
You write as if “guns” were some kind of societal given. Only in America, where they have been written into the Constitution, which is a sacred text of its religion of patriotism.
The world has a violence problem, but only the the USA is it so particularly a gun-violence problem because of the prevalence of privately-owned firearms.
The rest of the world looks at the US obsession with gun-ownership and roll our eyes.
There should be a scientist under the Enlightenment sign instead of a guru appealing to the mystical. Enlightenment must come from knowledge of what is real and not from the imaginary.
The Toles cartoon is marvelous. I’ve been a Toles fan since way back when he was drawing Randolph Itch, 2am.