By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams

Last week, blood-soaked NRA zombie Wayne LaPierre crawled out of his cave to whine to an audience at Liberty University that, “So many of those elites, they think they’re better than us.” He went on to proclaim, “They think they’re more intellectually evolved somehow than we are…Well, I’ve got news for the elites who look down their noses at all of us and our rights: We gun owners are a heck of a lot smarter than you’ll ever be…Never have there been smarter, freer American citizens than America’s one hundred million gun owners.”

Oddly, he declined to mention the disheartening torrent of gun fail stories in which almost 17,000 American citizens are unintentionally shot or killed each year – today, the Alabama four-year-old who shot himself in the head while his mom went shopping – and the fact that many contradict the good-guy-with-a-gun fairy tales they regularly propagate, but still.

To prove his well-taken if sick point that “there’s never been a group of citizens so engaged, so determined, so resolute (and) so politically savvy”- and because it’s not enough we already face the prospect of “a militia of toddlers” in Iowa and a rejection of any Supreme Court nominee not supported by gun freaks – the NRA has now reached out to the next generation of gun fetishists with their own fairy tales.

Presented on the NRA Family (sic) website and created by a “lifelong writer and patriot,” the stories consider “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,” because everything is better when you add guns, even to kids’ imaginations.

In Red Riding Hood (Has A Gun), the first entry, Red is “given her very own rifle and lessons on how to use it – just in case – to be sure that she would always be safe.” She enters the woods feeling “the reassuring weight of the rifle on her shoulder” and, when she senses the wolf, “she shifted her rifle so that it was in her hands and at the ready,” and the wolf runs away. He goes to the grandmother’s and is preparing to eat her when she turns all Dirty Harry: “Those big ears heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun’s safety being clicked off. Those big eyes looked down and saw that grandma had a scattergun aimed right at him.”

In Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns), the kids likewise “had been taught how safely to use a gun (and) knew how to keep themselves safe should they find themselves in trouble,” and never mind actually learning any of that critical thinking nonsense. Thus are they are saved from the witch with more NRA talking points, as “Gretel stood at the ready with her firearm just in case.”

The NRA’s latest depraved act of pandering and incitement has already sparked furious criticism and the hashtag NRA fairytales, where the seven dwarves are packing heat; Goldilocks, finding the unknown brown figures, knows what to do – “Firing quickly, she dropped all three” – and in a real-life scenario of 20 gun-carrying movie-goers vs. a gunman, “No stray bullets hit innocent bystanders.” Hardly anyone lived happily ever after, but the NRA made a shitload of money.