An unsettling thing in my morning paper

I was riding the bus from my first job of the day to my second, and I had read and reread my paper, having recently allowed my iPod to be run over by a bus (yes, really), and being extremely bored, I went through all my old newspapers doing the crosswords. And then when I got really desperate I did the Jumble. I was that bored. And then between ARRAY and LIMIT, something caught my eye.

Yeah, Ernie's got Bert eyebrows. and Elmo does too. and something funny is going on with Grover. So I put on my bifocals and swooped in for a closer look.
Elmo's got a handgun, Cookie Monster has a machine gun of some kind, Grover is smoking, and Ernie has a knife. I instantly came up with two theories.
"Ha, some clever smart-ass is having a laugh, as Ricky Gervaise would say."
"No, some lazy dumb-ass has searched the internet for a picture of the cast of Sesame Street, found this parody and been too lazy to even look at it."
Hmm, I'm still on the fence. Incidentally, here's an original, easily found through Google image search.