Time Magazine demands an end to mass shootings with cover by artist John Mavroudis

Time Magazine has used the cover of its latest issue to call for the end of gun violence – and the hypocrisies in the way White Nationalist terrorism is addressed in the US – with a striking typographic cover by artist John Mavroudis.

The cover, which will feature in the 19 August edition, lists the 253 locations where mass shootings (those involving the deaths of four or more people, excluding the shooter) have occurred in the US in 2019 alone. In the centre, a blank void spells the word “Enough”.

Mavroudis’ illustration accompanies a feature by W.J. Hennigan, titled We Are Being Eaten From Within, analysing White Nationalist terrorism in the US. In the past decade, 73 per cent of mass shootings in the US have been perpetrated by far-right extremists, despite the increasing demonisation of Muslim communities in the US media. The piece follows two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio last weekend which collectively killed 31 people.

Time CEO Edward Felsenthal said in a statement about the cover: “We all have our measures of how obscenely normalised domestic terror has become. At Time, one is how frequently we have felt compelled to devote our cover to the subject. In my own less than two years in this job, we’ve run seven of them, from the 2017 massacre at a Las Vegas music festival that killed 58 people to this spring’s murder of 50 worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.”

Felsenthal goes on to explain that although the majority of the covers following tragic shootings have been photography-led – including another “Enough” cover after the Parkland, Florida attack, he felt that the recent tragedies demanded a different approach. “As the week went on, what seemed to me to travel the farthest and speak the loudest were not pictures but numbers,” Felsenthal explains. “Numbers that showed how tragically exceptional America is in its gun violence.”

San Francisco-based John Mavroudis, who has created previous typographic covers for Time said of his design: “It’s a frightening portrait of a country drowning in gun violence. We need to take smart, effective action to stop the carnage. Weapons of war do not belong on our streets.”