Okay, so this happened: Madonna had a show in Scotland on Saturday (part of her world tour, going on since late May) in which she and her dancers "waved" a bunch of fake machine guns and pistols, despite what happened in Aurora, Colorado a day before involving actual machine guns and pistols. She was warned against using such questionable props (which are actually banned in Scotland), but ignored the warnings and used them anyway, her staff claiming that nothing should stand in the way of "art." I'm sure the only thing we're missing here is context. Comforting, sense-making context... Oh, that was it? Madonna is just going out of her way to be an asshole and claim "art"? Okay then! Let's bolt all possible projectiles to the ground and handle this together.

From Ethan Persoff's ongoing chronicles of vintage weird ephemera: COMICS WITH PROBLEMS #7 - MADONNA ON AIDS. This public health pamphlet was handed out at one of her concerts, one night only, in 1987. Her image appears on the cover, and inside, a handwritten note urging for greater awareness of AIDS and an end to prejudice against those who contract it (or who are HIV-positive).