The Valley News (N.H.), March 31:
The National Rifle Association has long specialized in fairy tales. Our favorites include “Obama is coming for our guns”; “Universal background checks will lead to a national gun registry”; and the classic “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
Now, however, the NRA has taken this affinity for the fantastic to a whole new level. The New York Times reports that the group is publishing online a series of reimagined fairy tales in which central characters “are now packing heat.” Indeed, the first two in the series – Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun) and Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns) – are available on the NRA Family website, alongside such useful consumer guides as “9 Concealed-Carry Purses for Summer and Spring” (“The weather is changing and so should your purses. Here’s our list of concealed-carry accessories, purses and bags you need to match your colorful, fun and fast summer lifestyle.”)
Anyway, the Brothers Grimm (the originals, not the Kochs) have been rewritten by Amelia Hamilton, who is identified on the website as a conservative blogger and “a lifelong writer and patriot.” In its introduction to the page, the NRA asks readers whether the fairy tales read to them as children ever made “them rest a little bit uneasy,” and whether they have ever wondered what those stories might sound like if the hapless victims had been armed. We suspect that for the vast majority of people, the answer to the first query is “yes,” and to the second, “certainly not.” Then again, the nightmares that trouble our sleep tend to be more complicated than specters of government agents seizing our firearms.
In any case, in the NRA version, the Big, Bad Wolf more than meets his match in Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, armed with a rifle and a shotgun respectively and equipped with knowledge of how to use them. As Hamilton tells it, the classic exchange “What big teeth you have!”; “The better to eat you with” concludes a colloquy between Grandma and wolf, after which the latter leans in menacingly, jaws wide open, only to be stopped dead in his tracks by the sound of Grandma clicking off the safety on her shotgun, which she has surreptitiously retrieved during their exchange.
Not surprisingly, taking liberties with the Brothers Grimm has incensed some interested parties, and not on literary grounds. Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, denounced the stories as “a disgusting, morally depraved marketing campaign,” especially in light of the fact that 50 children and teenagers are shot each day in the United States. Presumably the NRA rebuttal to this would be that fewer kids would get shot if more kids could shoot back, but Gross’ point is well taken.
But the NRA’s effort does inspire us to indulge in a fairy tale of our own imagining. In this one, the next mass slaughter of innocents by a deranged shooter is followed not by NRA lamentations that it all could have been prevented had the victims only been armed and returned fire, but by a honest conversation about what sensible measures might rein in the reign of terror inflicted by indiscriminate gun violence in America.
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