GVPanorama: When Our Orgy of Gun Violence Came to My Hometown
A graphic short story about the Highland Park shooting
“Eyewitnesses used to tell TV reporters, ‘I never thought it could happen here.’ We don’t say that in America anymore. We all know it can happen here. If it hasn’t already.”
Today’s GVPanorama discovery is a vivid and personal graphic short story from cartoonist and animator, Eric Orner.
Posted by The Nation in December, 2024, it tells Orner’s account of the Highland Park, Illinois, shooting on July 4, 2022. The shooter’s father was a year behind Orner in high school, and owned a convenience store where he used to see the shooter as a child. “The kid liked to work at the store making sandwiches.”
In the tradition of the best graphic novels, the story efficiently coveys in sparse text and drawings a number of meditations on that horrible event.
In only four sheets, he conveys his tragic, personal connection to the shooting and a socio-economic shift in his hometown that he subtly suggests may be one of many possible explanations for the durability of the sad American question, “How did this happen here?” There’s even a strange twist at the end.
The post allows you to print out the novella, which might be an idea for teachers reading this to give to their class upon a discussion of gun violence.
Check out the full story here.
Eric Orner is an openly gay American cartoonist and animator, whose works often revolve around LGBT issues. He is best known for the long-running syndicated comic strip, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green and the 2022 graphic novel, Smahtguy: The Life and Time of Barney Frank, whom Orner once worked for as a Congressional aide. (via Wikipedia)
I am sorry to say that the phrase, "I never thought it would happen here," is still something people say, at least, as recently as March of 2023. That's when "our" orgy of gun violence happened, at a small Christian school not far from where I grew up in Nashville, TN. Again, it happened in a "leafy, affluent suburb." Funny that.
A former student at the Covenant School--a trans man, barely over a hundred pounds, but armed with a semi-automatic rifle--shot through the doors of the school, setting off the fire alarms. Kids began to evacuate their classrooms, and they were shot dead. The principal, a custodian, and another teacher also died.
Everybody was "shocked." Why? I was not shocked, but as the days passed and more information came in, I became more and more upset. The state legislature was in session, and immediate pressure was put on legislators to pass, say, red flag laws. But instead the legislature adjourned early. They met again in a "special session" in August. The governor, who had lost a close friend in the shooting, did not show up. Screaming, weeping parents and survivors made no difference. Sober, rational proposals made no difference. What they did was: they passed a law allowing teachers to carry guns in schools.
Never mind that the teachers at the Covenant School were armed. They just didn't have time to get their guns out. The shooter burst in and slaughtered them before they had time to even realize what was happening.
The only positive thing about this story is how quickly and bravely the police behaved: they were there in 15 minutes. They killed the shooter, and you can watch footage from their body cameras as they hunted the shooter in this very fancy-looking school. Some of them did not even have helmets, much less armor. Some were armed only with pistols. But they showed up and they got the job done.