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Comic Name: Powder Keg
Description: Disclaimer: The above cartoon is intended to be enjoyed as a work of comedy and political expression and does NOT represent incitement to, or endorsement of, any form of violence or insurrectionary activity either in real life or in Minecraft.
Mouseover: Funny how no one says that to the Taliban.
Image Name: second-amendment-john-f-kennedy-stonetoss-political-cartoon.png
Amogus: Second panel, a glare in the corner of the windshield frame.
Originally Published: 6/24/2021

What The Comic Is: A gay caricature offers a smug rhetorical to a Gadsden flag-shirt wearing gun owner, asking him what his second amendment could do against the government’s jet planes and nukes. The second panel shows United States President JFK as he rides in the back of the car he was assassinated in.

What StoneToss Actually Thinks: Presidents have been assassinated before, therefore gun owners can fight the military.

Why It’s Fucking Stupid: God damn it. You know, I try not to make posts covering the most recent StoneToss comic because I’m trying to work my way through a massive backlog of old shit, but the guy just can’t not say something egregiously stupid and force my hand. So here we are.

StoneToss is a big proponent of the second amendment, or the “right to bear arms” and has made roughly a dozen or so comics before where he plays into this fantasy of gun owners standing up to tyrannical governments (be them the British during the revolutionary war or some strawman version of the modern day). Second amendments adherents will argue that we need high powered automatic weapons “incase the government goes rogue”, as this is (depending on who you ask) part of the reason the second amendment was drafted in the first place: to allow citizens to arm themselves for protection against what included their own government. The common argument against this (as seen in the comic) is that the the USA’s military has equipment and power far eclipsing any guns civilians have access to. StoneToss has grappled with this argument before, always doing incredibly poorly at it, and this time is no different.

StoneToss tries to zero in on a presidential assassination, in this case JFK, though really any assassination would’ve worked (and by ‘worked’ I mean ‘failed’). As you might have already learned, John F. Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States and served from January 1961 until November 1963, when he died at the hand (or, well, the bullet) of sharpshooter Lee Harvey Oswald. And it’s true, sure. Oswald was just a guy who went into a building and shot the President of the United States. But what does this have to do with the argument that gun owners could battle against the US Government? Absolutely fucking nothing.

JFK was the last US President to ever be assassinated, and it was through a pure lapse of logistics (or perhaps more to do with the fact it was assumed no one would be stupid enough to actually shoot the President, or maybe you subscribe to the conspiracy theory that it was all an inside job by the CIA). Oswald did not battle against the might of the US military to reach Kennedy, like some kind of end-stage boss battle in a fucking FPS game. These days the security of the President is taken so seriously that most people with plans to harm the political leader don’t make it within ten miles of the el presidente’s location before being picked up and arrested. And even if you did manage to kill the President, what exactly does this prove? That guns can kill someone if you shoot them? Wow, what a brilliant conclusion. I guess without the President, the US military’s nukes and jet planes suddenly stop working, like some kind of domino effect when you take out the head vampire. Somehow I think there’s a slight difference between shooting at an unarmored, unprotected man in a car who doesn’t know you’re there and shooting at a heavily armored military vehicle equipped with top of the line anti-life technology that is being piloted by a group of fully trained soldiers who already know your exact location thanks to heat mapping done by drones that are so high in the sky you can’t even see them. I mean, this is just a hypothetical anyways because if this scenario were real, you wouldn’t even see the armored vehicle full of soldiers driving towards you because you’d have already been terraformed by the tactical bombing.

But alright, alright. We don’t need to go into a big imaginary scenario where the US military attacks its own citizens. We’ve been down that road before and frankly the answer is always: There is no previous comparison (the revolutionary war, JFK assassination) that stacks up anywhere close to today’s power disparity that exists between the US military and anyone/everyone else. If we imagine a world where the entirety of the US military suddenly turns on the population, we’re fucked. No local LARPer militia or “I watch lots of military training videos on YouTube” heroes are going to stop them. the argument “but what about the Middle East!” is often employed when trying to find examples of an ‘undergeared’ militia fending off the US military, even StoneToss calls upon it by mentioning the Taliban. Well, let’s talk about that for a minute. What kind of weapons does the Taliban have? Military weapons. Where did they get them? From the US military, either directly or indirectly (many weapons and equipment were taken after government militaries abandoned them, this is due in large part to Middle Eastern militaries and their incredibly poor leadership, as they promote based entirely on loyalty rather than any other qualification). So by bringing up the Taliban, StoneToss is arguing that the US military’s equipment can be defeated, but only by a force that is using the US military’s equipment. Fucking genius. This is ignoring the sheer logistical issues the US faces when doing war in the Middle East, and that they would not be facing any of these massive problems if invading their own soil, making their war machine dozens of times more efficient and severely hampering the ability to “hide in the hills” ala Middle Eastern terrorist cells.

“OH YA THE ARMY HAS NUKE??? K WELL WHAT BOUT…. UHHH…. WHAT BOUT…. WHAT BOUT BRITISH ARMY IN THE 1700’S?”

“Did the British army in the 1700’s have nuclear weapons?”

<StoneToss offers no reply or acknowledgement, he is too busy making a comic about molesting kids>

Comic Name: Suffrage the Consequences
Description: I’m pretty sure they were pro gay marriage too.
Mouseover: It’s what they would’ve wanted.
Image Name: 2nd-amendment-founding-fathers-comic.png
Originally Published: 1/8/2020

What The Comic Is: A gay caricature smugly comments that the founding fathers would not have wanted citizens owning assault rifles. The second panel flashes back to the founding fathers, with one of them commenting that they sure hope black homosexual women will be able to vote.

What StoneToss Actually Thinks: The constitution doesn’t say anything about restricting the right to bear arms, therefore it is just as relevant today as it was back then because the founding fathers wanted everything a certain way and weren’t thinking about black lesbians.

Why It’s Fucking Stupid: Holy fuck this comic is so amazingly fucking stupid. It’s a shoo-in for one of StoneToss’ stupidest comics of all time. StoneToss often fails to create a valid (or anything resembling a halfway intelligent) argument or observation with his comics. He normally has to lean into nonexistent strawmen or just rely on pure mask-off bigotry in order to reach any kind of point. But this is one of those StoneToss comics where the dumbfuck actually defeats himself with his own argument. You could very easily slightly edit the text in the first panel to say “The founding fathers wanted everyone to be able to own guns for all time!” and then leave the second panel as it is, and you’d have a perfect argument against gun ownership. The crux of StoneToss’ argument is that the founding fathers weren’t thinking, or caring, about things like black homosexual women being able to vote or about guns in the future being immeasurably more powerful than they were in the 1800’s. And yeah, they basically weren’t, which is why things in the USA have changed despite not being covered specifically in the original documents that founded the country.

Guess who didn’t have many rights 200 years ago? Black people, women and homosexuals. Guess who has broken barriers and fought for their right to be treated with equality and equity? Black people, women and homosexuals. Almost as if the words of the Constitution are not infallible laws meant to be eternally adhered to and our society is, in fact, capable of changing and realizing the ideals and things thought to be important in the 1700’s are not necessarily the same today. And StoneToss makes this argument for us with the second panel of the comic. What a stupid motherfucker.

Yeah, it doesn’t matter what the founding fathers were thinking about when they drafted the constitution. It was hundreds of fucking years ago. Of course they didn’t think of black lesbians being able to vote, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen anyway once society evolved and changed. If black lesbians can vote, then what’s to say the second amendment can’t be re-interpreted or changed? StoneToss certainly doesn’t make a case for it.

So thank you, StoneToss, though you’re an idiot and didn’t realize what you were doing, for agreeing with the rest of us that, yes, the founding fathers did not have the insight necessary to forge lasting fundamentals that would reach into the year 2000 and beyond. I know you were trying so, so hard to be smug and smart with your little comic, but hey. Better to be accidentally woke than unironically bigoted, I guess?