“What would it look like if I took America’s obsession with firearms to its logical extreme?” the artist Eric Drooker says about his New Yorker cover for the issue dated December 14, 2015. The proliferation of guns and the too-easy access to military-grade weapons is not the only story in San Bernardino, but it’s an appalling part of it. As John Cassidy points out in a recent essay, there are an estimated three hundred million guns in private hands in the U.S., and gun sales soared on Black Friday. And somehow, despite the growing demand for restrictions and background checks, the sales go on and, with them, the daily shootings. If only Eric Drooker’s image were a fiction.
Cover Story: Eric Drooker’s “Shopping Days”
