How Did You Spend Your Summer?

Here’s your cartoon for CNN’s weekly newsletter, Provoke/Persuade. Please sign up to get these in your inbox every Sunday for the rest of your life.

For this week’s newsletter, CNN Opinion turned it over to their readers to share how they spent their summer. My editors asked me to come up with something on the topic. This was my very first idea but we weren’t sure if we should go with it as the subject has some overlap with a cartoon I drew for them two weeks ago. Now, I think it’s more than appropriate because events are overlapping.

Yesterday, there was another mass shooting. Another mass shooting in Texas. A gunman killed seven and wounded 22.

A colleague of mine published a cartoon on gun violence a few hours before the El Paso shooting. A lot of readers praised him for his timing. The same thing is happening to me today. But, c’mon. This is America. If you draw a cartoon about gun violence, you have a pretty good (no pun intended) shot of that cartoon landing on the same day as a mass shooting. We’re not psychics. Gun violence is as common in this country as Donald Trump saying something idiotic or racist. There is too much gun violence in this country. Why?

Because it’s too easy to get a gun. Because there are too many guns. Because there are too many people valuing their “gun rights” over lives.

Beto O’Rourke said, “This is fucked up.” I don’t have anything to add to that.

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