The NRA continues to target kids. In a new series on the National Rifle Association’s family-oriented website, conservative blogger Amelia Hamilton is rewriting classic Grimm’s fairy tales to include guns.
“Most of us probably grew up having fairy tales read to us as we drifted to sleep,” an editor’s note reads. “But how many times have you thought back and realized just how, well, grim some of them are? Did any of them ever make your rest a little bit uneasy? Have you ever wondered what those same fairy tales might sound like if the hapless Red Riding Hoods, Hansels and Gretels had been taught about gun safety and how to use firearms?”
So far, the pro-gun group has published updates to two classic tales: Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun) and Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns). At no point in either story do the main characters fire their weapons, but the firearms allow them to deal with danger.
In the NRA’s twisted version of Hansel and Gretel, the brother and sister are shown hunting for food when they stumble upon an evil witch’s candy-covered house. With guns at the ready, they free two boys who are being held captive. “The hinges gave a groan and the sound of the witch’s snoring stopped,” Hamilton writes. “Gretel got her rifle ready, but lowered it again when the snoring resumed.”
Hamilton defended her tales during a March 21 appearance on the NRA’s Cam & Company Show. “In the original Hansel and Gretel, the plot of the story is that the village is starving so they leave Hansel and Gretel in the woods to starve to death because the parents can’t afford to feed them,” she said. “In my version, they were just going to explore some different areas of the woods and see if they could come up with something to help feed the family, which apparently is a million times worse than sending your children to starve to death alone in the woods.”
In Hamilton’s reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf meets a heat-packing Granny. “Those big ears heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun’s safety being clicked off,” reads one passage. “Those big eyes looked down and saw that grandma had a scattergun aimed right at him. He realized that Grandmother hadn’t been backing away from him; she had been moving towards her shotgun to protect herself and her home.”
The NRA tale continues: “The wolf couldn’t believe his luck — he had come across two capable ladies in the same day, and they were related! Oh, how he hated when families learned how to protect themselves.”
Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, describes the fairy tales as a “disgusting, morally depraved marketing campaign.”
“The NRA continues to stoop to new lows in the hopes of shoving guns into America’s youngest hands,” Gross said in a statement on Friday, March 25. If nothing else, this approach demonstrates just how desperate the organization has become to sell more guns — it must now advertise deadly weapons to kids by perverting childhood classics with no regard whatsoever for the real life carnage happening every day. To be frank, it’s pathetic.”
Ladd Everitt, Director of Communications of Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is also fired up. “The NRA’s new fairy tales are hardly surprising. For some time now, they have been aggressively marketing firearms to young consumers,” Everitt tells Us Weekly. “This latest pitch attempts to make future customers out of toddlers and grade schoolers. The NRA is taking extreme measures to ensure industry profits because gun ownership in this country has been steadily declining for decades. In 1977, 54% of American households reported owning at least one firearm. By 2014, that figure had declined to 32%. It’s likely to get worse, because demographic trends in the U.S. do not bode well for the gun industry.”
According to the Brady Campaign, nearly every day in America, nearly 50 children and teenagers are shot.
A third story, The Three Little Pigs (Have Guns), is due in May.
