Guns Cause All Of This Trouble!

Submission 21,997

Part of a series on Gun Control Debate. [View Related Entries]

About

Guns Cause All Of This Trouble! refers to a 2012 political cartoon about gun control that turned into an exploitable. It shows two parents watching TV about a school shooting, and their child or son in the background playing a violent, shooting video game, shouting, "Kill them! Kill them all!" Meme creators replaced what was being said in the speech bubbles and replaced the media on each TV, making ironic iterations. The most common replacement of the son's speech bubble were -ussy variants like Clussy. The template took off en masse in early the 2020s amid events like the 2022 Buffalo, New York Supermarket Shooting.

Origin

On December 16th, 2012, cartoonist Ron Smith Jr. posted tweets^[1]^[2] reacting to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting, citing violent video games as pre-cursors for real-life gun violence. On December 28th, 2012, Smith Jr. drew a cartoon titled, "God Will Know His Own," depicting a young boy being radicalized by violent video games while the parents are clueless, instead proclaiming to an opposite TV, "Guns cause all of this trouble!" (shown below). The original cartoon link has since been deleted, however, on December 31st, 2012 it was included in a Blogspot^[3] blog.

Spread

On June 21st, 2016, the cartoon was included in a blog post on a website run by Medium.^[4] On February 16th, 2018, Smith Jr. reposted his cartoon in a tweet,^[5] captioning it, "Video games train you to fight, kill and waste an enormous amount of time….Until one finds use for such skills….." Over the course of four years, the tweet received 28 likes (shown below).

Inspired by Smith Jr.'s February 2018 resharing of the meme on Twitter, the cartoon spread to other outlets, progressively becoming associated with Cursed Boomer Images often shared on Facebook. For instance, on February 22nd, 2018, Redditor Praise_Allah1 shared Facebook screenshots to /r/gaming,^[6] earning roughly 11,400 upvotes in four years (shown below).

On October 23rd, 2019, the cartoon was shared to /r/boomerhumor^[7] by Redditor Spicy-Meat_, earning roughly 2,000 upvotes in three years. The next day, on October 24th, Redditor u/Amateurlapse posted the first-known exploited version of the template to /r/bonehurtingjuice, ^[8] replacing the speech bubbles with words about Obama, earning 49 upvotes in three years (shown below, left). The cartoon surfaced again within a meme on Reddit's /r/memes,^[9] posted by Redditor bankruptbank69 on November 1st, 2020, using a SpongeBob template and earning roughly 36,500 upvotes in two years (shown below, right).

Starting in 2021, the cartoon was exploited en masse on Twitter, iFunny and on the OkBuddyRetard subreddit. For instance, on April 14th, 2021, a since-deleted Redditor posted a version to /r/AnarchyChess^[10] that replaced the boy's TV screen with a chess game, earning roughly 17,400 upvotes in one year (shown below, left). On September 30th, 2021, Redditor average_dankster posted a version to /r/okbuddyretard^[11] that replaced the boy's TV with "Wallpaper Engine," earning roughly 9,100 likes in eight months (shown below, right).

After the 2022 Buffalo, New York Supermarket Shooting, a new iteration emerged from 4chan's /trash/^[12] imageboard that replaced the boy's screen with Martha Speaks, in reference to the shooter having that on his phone screen during the livestream.