"I think cartoonists should be like burrs under the saddle of some egomaniac, kind of gnawing away every day," says two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Szep. "I think the public likes cartoons because it gives them a vicarious pleasure that they normally can't get in any other way."
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Dana Summers by Dana Summers
(th)ink by Keith Knight
Comments (32) (Please sign in to comment)
Doug Thomas
said, 5 months ago
I’m no fan of the NRA, but this is a very exaggerated view of the significant majority of its members who use rifles for hunting, for example, or who target practice for fun. Personally, I’d be happier if most of the 300,000,000 weapons in peoples’ hands were collected and melted down, but demonizing those who represent the other point of view isn’t going to make this issue any simpler to work through.
cdward said, 5 months ago
@Doug Thomas
I disagree. While certainly not all members of the NRA are of this ilk, (it once was a good organization that had as its goal gun safety), the leadership has shifted to preaching that all guns are good, that no gun should ever be off limits, and that there should basically be no limits on ownership (including a requirement for proper training). The fact that they support and defend ownership of military-type weapons (which have one primary function – to kill people), shows that this cartoon has merit.
There is something to the argument that 10,000 gun deaths really isn’t that big a deal compared to auto accident deaths – but we KNOW that other countries are safer (gun-wise) because of a combination of good public education/health care and mental health service AND strict gun regulation (including Switzerland which, though it has a high rate of gun ownership also has far more restrictive rules than would ever be considered here by the NRA).
Gresch said, 5 months ago
Paul… lazy… just plain lazy
Clark Kent said, 5 months ago
The USA is desperately sick, deeply disturbed.
Chillbilly
said, 5 months ago
My niece with three little girls just got a what she wanted for Christmas: a semi-auto handgun. Not a few days prior she was publicly crying on facebook about how wrong the shooting in CT was.
.
This IS a sick country.
lisapaloma13 said, 5 months ago
@cdward
Amen, cdward. And I think that like my dad, many of the rational members of the NRA left the organization when it became extremist. And I imagine that the majority of the remaining “rational” members have allowed themselves to be swayed by the preaching of the gun manufacturers who run it.
Bruce4671 said, 5 months ago
http://home.nra.org/#/nraorg/custom/pressRelease_ORGReplayTranscript_imagemap
Why is it that liberals hate so much?
Radish
said, 5 months ago
Statistically speaking, that family is more likey to kill each other than anyone else.
Harleyquinn
said, 5 months ago
over half of all gun deaths are suicide so let us just make a law that suicide is illegal and libbs would think the problem with guns is solved……
ruff
said, 5 months ago
That kid in green looks like it’s borrowed from Giles.
echoraven said, 5 months ago
@Gresch
and the produce of lots of Kool Aid.
zekedog55
said, 5 months ago
Howie and “Mr.” Ima’s Maw and Paw!
Nice snapshot of the little whippersnappers, too…
Maw—“Eat up now, so you can go back to the basement!”
Paw—“Mergle flergle gurgle, derp.”
M Ster said, 5 months ago
Dated May 11, 1995: WASHINGTON – Former president George Bush, a gun enthusiast and decades-long member of the National Rifle Association, has resigned from the group because of its statements that agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are “jackbooted thugs” who harass gun owners.
“Your broadside against federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor, and it offends my concept of service to country,” Bush wrote to NRA president Thomas Washington in a May 3 letter that was released yesterday. “It indirectly slurs a wide array of government law-enforcement officials, who are out there, day and night, laying their lives on the line for all of us.”
Bush said NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre’s description of federal agents as " `wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms’ (and) wanting to `attack law-abiding citizens’ is a vicious slander on good people." LaPierre used the description in a fund-raising letter sent to the NRA’s 3.5 million members early this year, and he defended it in the wake of the April 19 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.
mickey1339
said, 5 months ago
The cartoonists are going from the sublime to the absurd on this issue. That is the way they make money. Of course it does stoke the already roaring flames of partisan divide in our country and take the divisiveness to new heights. Screaming for new laws and regulations is comforting to many and it’s cheap to accomplish. Dealing with the underlying problems with mental illness, crime, children reared in broken homes often with multiple sets of parents, a culture that worships violence, that means a long term very expensive commitment that we are not willing to make.
d_legendary1 said, 5 months ago
@zekedog55
Hiya Zeke! Long time! You forgot to add the “tabakey” and the moonshine.