When Will We Enter A New Era?

That does not have so much gun violence.

Good morning, all!

I just searched for another drawing about Thanskgiving, but failed to find it, or any on the subject of this holiday that I wanted to share with you. So I think this is my cue to go another direction.

---

We awoke this morning to another mass shooting, this time in Chesapeake, Virgina. The Washington Post writes that this is the seventh mass shooting in seven days. Six people were killed, I’m not sure if any were children.

I have lost count of how many gun control drawings I have done.

The one below was in The New Yorker in 1992. What I think I was getting at is that at the time, New York City was going through a really dangerous period, mostly brought on by a crack epidemic. Wikipedia tells us “The U.S. cities with the highest crack index were New York especially in the Washington Heights neighborhood, Newark and Philadelphia.”

In 1992, selling handguns on the street was such an odd thought that it made it slightly funny. I personally was angry and it was one of the reasons I left the city with my husband to raise our daughters just north in the country. I come from a non-violent Quaker background— about guns, I sometimes feel like Rachel in the scene from Witness where she handles a gun. As if simply touching a gun is dangerous or somehow contagious. I think in a previous scene, she even used a cloth to pick up a gun, so as not to touch it with her skin.

A crack epidemic is what caused me to draw about guns in 1992. What is it now that causes such gun obsession and violence? Is this our true nature? I don’t believe so.

---

Today is also the anniversary of the assasination of President John Kennedy. Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote about that this morning in her newsletter, Letters From America, reminding me about this day.

I was very young when that happened. I found my mother on her bed crying—it was the first time I had ever seen her cry. It was shocking. That whole span of years, from 1963 into the early 1970’s, was eye opening for me, and the country. As Richardson writes, it was a “dramatic break” from what came before. We entered a modern era. I am sorry guns play such a big part.

I drew this as part of a graphic short story about 15 years ago.

When will we turn a corner from the current, ongoing gun violence and enter a new era?

I am more than ready for it.