Pew pew, tinkle tinkle

​I don't know who did this one - no signature that I can find. Thought it was interesting for the intended message and the unintended one. The obvious one is clearly: shooting himself in the foot.

But the cartoonist did something that I suspect he'd be mortified to learn. Can you spot the problem? Take a second if it's not immediately clear.

Spoiler alert - the answer's coming up ...

He painted the person shooting himself with a revolver and ALSO illustrated brass being ejected. Thereby confusing two classes of handguns. Revolvers hold their brass in the chambers - you have to rotate the barrel out to empty the brass cases. It's only semi-automatic pistols (like Bruce Willis used in Die Hard) that eject them itself. They also throw them pretty far from the gun - they don't just drop down as illustrated. So two errors, although the second was just done for artistic reasons, obviously. 

Anyway ... most cartoonists hate to get stuff like this wrong. I know I do. What makes it interesting, though, is that the person who posted it (where I first saw it) was making a point that liberal cartoonists who don't know how revolvers work shouldn't be making laws about guns. 

Well, first off, there aren't many cartoonists who are in a position to make laws about anything. The cartoonist closest to politics in a national way, besides editorial cartoonists, is Jake Tapper. But he reports the news, he doesn't make the laws. 

 Beyond this, the cartoon speaks to how one needn't understand how something works to understand what it does. Few can really understand what's happening inside their phones yet everyone knows what they do and how they influence our society. And one needn't be fully up on the biology going on inside someone's cells to know that the person himself isn't someone who should be allowed outside without a personal handler. 

And on the OTHER hand, I also see the implication in the image that it IS important to know something about how things actually work before moving to regulate or restrict them. The laws we have in place in California, for instance, are quite assinine in many ways. Whether a weapon is judged to be an "assault weapon" is based on objective measures that make terribly little sense. Color, for instance, is one of the criteria. The shape of the handles is another. Long guns that look like Rambo would use them are bad but ones that John Wayne would pick are good. Pretty silly once examined with an unbiased eye. 

Whew. So much thinking from such a simple cartoon. But ... that's what good cartoons should do! Make us think. 

​Wish I knew who created it. Anyone know?