Thursday, February 27, 2014

Undue Burden Cartoon Published

I've just received a copy of a book by Steve Freeman, Guns in America: Common Sense vs. Nonsense, which includes one of my cartoons. The book was written out of a sense of frustration with the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass the Toomey-Manchin bill after a gunman slaughtered twenty kindergartners and first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

The author starts out his book description at amazon.com with a complaint about pro-gun reviewers slamming his book:
"IMPORTANT NOTE: Please ignore some reviews. The pro-gunners (anti-gun control crowd) have been planting negative reviews- one star- from the very beginning. They haven’t ordered or read the book, but this is what they do. The person who first did it (or organized it) discredited himself by planting the first 4 on the same day. Let’s play fair. At least read the book. Thanks."
He also notes in his letter to me that these people cannot possibly have read his book, since he knows personally all but two of the people who have bought his book to date. And, yes, I think we can safely ignore the review that puts "book" in quotation marks to indicate that, somehow, it isn't one. Sadly, I have to agree with one of the first several reviewers that the book lacks documentation -- the footnotes that any self-respecting work of non-fiction ought to have.

On the other hand, I welcome appreciation of editorial cartoon as a form of commentary. Other cartoonists in the book are Steve Greenberg, Bruce Plante, Robert Ariail and Kate Salley Palmer, and we are all properly credited.

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