Apparently there is a “Ask Garry Trudeau” section on the Doonesbury site. Someone asked the following question:
It is clear from this week’s series that GBT is a knee-jerk liberal gun-hater. Why?
— R.S., Davenport, IA
And got this lame answer from one of Garry’s aides:
GBT does not hate guns. He grew up in a family of hunters and sport shooters — his grandfather had over 20 shotguns and rifles — and joined the NRA as a kid. He got a .22 when he was seven, a shotgun at 12, and his first deer rifle at 16. The NRA’s main message at that time was gun safety, and he was completely on board. He got their magazine, and competed in NRA marksmanship events, winning several medals. When GBT moved to the city he took one of his guns with him, and within a few months it was stolen out of his house. He parted ways with the NRA when it ceased to be a sporting association and turned into an insane political lobby. (Source)
What I would like to tell his aide:
Way to skirt around the question. The very first sentence is “GBT does not hate guns”
You continue on with something like… His grandfather used to have guns, then he got some *blah* *blah* *blah* NRA *blah* *blah* *blah* NRA *blah* NRA *blah* NRA is insane.
Huh? You didn’t even answer the question. All you did was talk about the NRA too much, then get your dig in that it is an “insane” political lobby.
I guess his aides drink the same kool-aid as he does. Likely hemp or patchouli flavored :P
Comments
20 responses to “Someone Asked Garry Trudeau Why He Hates Guns”
First off, Why does he have aides, yet alone one aide?
Second, sounds to me like someone who is now trying to cover their ass and appeal to gun owners.
Third, GBT = Great Big Turd
Fourth, If the NRA is a “insane” political organization, wouldn’t that be a terrorist organization? Heck, I sometimes think the Brady Campaign is insane.
Heh yea like he would get so much mail that he needs to have “people” handle it. My guess is he just pretends to be an aide when it is convenient in order to distance himself.
hahah great big turd.. nice one
#1: Doonesbury is a syndicated, corporate strip. Gary himself hasn’t drawn the strip in probably twenty years. Basically, once a newspaper comic gets well-established, it becomes a moneymaking machine. That means they can’t have issues with writers’ block, missed deadlines, writers trying to “push the envelope” either artistically or subjectively, or anything like that.
Newspapers pay something like $8 a day, per strip. Doonesbury, being in some 1,400 papers a day, means a daily income of $11,000, every, freakin’, day. That means running it like a business, and that means a team of writers, a team of artists, a team of assistants, managers, and so on.
A strip as popular as Doonesbury probably gets ten to twenty thousand legit emails a day (not including the spam) and most likely hundreds more comments per day to their website, as above. An aide or three is a necessity.
Note this aide is also doing PR. He or she didn’t, as noted, actually answer the question, but gave some essentially irrelevant background- which, to be perfectly honest, I don’t believe for one single second- as an explanation.
Conveniently forgetting that Gary has, himself, become an “insane political organization”.
#2 is as above- the aide is doing PR. No insults, no namecalling, and the reply can be taken positively by both sides. Righties can convince themselves “well, at least he was once one of us”, while at the same time the lefties can reassure themselves that “he’s left all that redneck crap behind”.
And #4, the political angle is just a smokescreen. If you disagree with an organizations’ politics, as you’d expect from a guy born and raised in New York and a graduate of the Yale School of Art, it’s quite easy to convince yourself their politics have become ‘warped’.
Like the common strawman argument where the lefty says the NRA wants everyone to have a machine gun, no paperwork and no questions asked, Gary conveniently omits the fact the NRA is *still* primarily about teaching safety, and was forced into the political side in self-defense, after the demonization of firearms in the sixties, thanks to some well-publicized assassinations.
In other words, he’s using the angle of the NRA’s politics as an excuse, a semiplausible reason to explain the beliefs he already held. If he did, in fact, ever once hold an NRA membership (and remember, Josh Sugarmann and Michael Moore did too) I suspect that it was a membership purchased and paid for my the grandfather, and at best, accepted “just to humor the old man”.
Doc.
$11,000 per day?! That’s amazing.
Damn that’s a lot of emails.
Hell, my wimpy little webcomic? At the height of my airsmithing business, between the two of them I was getting upwards of a hundred a day. Include the spam and I’d have to sift 200 to 300 a day.
Doc.
Hah, Did you do the whiteboard? You are famous enough for me to guess it by the clues in your post and your name. You are pretty awesome.
Doc you are right, but it almost seems like complete slander to say the NRA is insane. To compromise on the regulation on firearms is “insane” to me, but it seems in bad taste to say the NRA is insane.
Keep in mind that the “insanity” most of the lefties accuse the NRA of, is for having the temerity to oppose the encroachment of a constitutional right.
Those same lefties will fight tooth and nail against the least threat against the 1st amendment (examples are the flag-burning thing and the repeated shootdowns of “hate speech” laws) but will say any encroachment on the 2nd (waiting periods, lock/securing regulations, outright bans) is “reasonable” and “common sense”.
So when the NRA opposes “cop killer bullets” or restrictions on semi-automatic rifles, those lefties say the organization has gone “insane”- they clearly want everyone to have armor-piercing bullets and machine guns!!!!1one
Doc.
1. The first part of the reply reminds me of the “Some of my best friends are black people” defense that you get from people who have some racist tendencies, but don’t want to acknowledge them.
2. He took is gun to “the city”, failed to secure it properly, it was stolen by a criminal due in part to his own negligence – and his conclusion is that the NRA is insane?
I think I’ll cafepress a bumper sticker with Calvin peeing on a Doonesbury character, and put it beside the NRA and TSRA stickers on my truck window …..
Don’t let a comic strip persuade you to do something illegal.
LOL @ your point #1
haha calvin peeing on doonesbury.
If I knew it was this easy to get GBT to wet his pants, I would have jumped on Open Carry years ago.
For $11,000 a day, I’ll make fun of Starbucks and gun owners (or pretty much anyone else for that matter). I’d even use some of the money to buy more guns!
Hell, I didn’t even know Doonesbury existed anymore. If not for pointing it out on here, I never would have realized. So really, how important is this? Everyone’s entitled to their opinion; I don’t think Trudeau is having any large impact on anyone’s beliefs with his little comic strip. Doonesbury taking a liberal, hippie stance on something shouldn’t surprise anyone. I’m afraid making an issue of it like this is only giving him more hits on his website. He and his staff are probably aware of this type of buzz and are laughing amongst themselves.
Heh you’re probably right.
Reminds me of someone who starts off a conversation on race with “Hey, some of my best friends are black.”
Highly suspicious.
Good to see I was not the only one thinking the same thing at the opening few lines.
Sounds like GBT didn’t learn anything about gun safety … had his gun stolen? Who’s fault is that???
Well yeah, he said that the NRA is insane, because frankly, they are batsh** nuts. Plain and simple.
I don’t read Doonesberry, I saw this nonsense on another site. I did want to comment that Trudeau is a twerp and his opinions are hoplophobic drivel.
You mad?