
Hansel and Gretel prepare to blow away whatever.
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.
As Ernie said today, “Wee lives matter.” We can’t have a habitable planet if every child packs a gun. The world would be a less dangerous place if all of the guns magically vanished. One man is dead and at least 17 others have been wounded in shootings in Chicago since Saturday afternoon, police said. Kids are victims of this violence. Wee lives matter.
The NRA seems now to pursue lunacy, an all-or-nothing policy that may one day require us all to own guns based on a shortened Second Amendment that reads, simply: “militia… necessary.” Surely this latest perversion, the arming of children, will finally bring down the NRA fanatics. Our own BigMedia seems to have avoided covering the NRA’s abuse of children, though it has admirably reported on the heartbreaking use of child soldiers throughout the world, most notably by Sudan warlords. We can all hope The Donald and the NRA and the US Congress constitute the last stand of Crazy Fucking White Men.
I don’t think the NRA wrote a story about the 7 dwarfs. You’re making that up.
You don’t read enough, kiddo. The Washington Post did the story four days ago. NPR and The New York Times followed. Of course, you may not believe they’re telling the truth, so maybe you should go to the NRA itself: http://www.nrafamily.org/articles/2016/1/13/little-red-riding-hood-has-a-gun/ Let me know what you think.