Sunday, March 27, 2016

EDIFYING TALES FOR THE YOUNG PIONEERS OF GUN-ISM

The New York Times reports:
Thanks to a series of reimagined fairy tales published online by the National Rifle Association, classic characters like Hansel and Gretel are now packing heat.

The group has published two of the updated tales on its N.R.A. Family website in recent months, entitled “Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun)” and “Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns).”
The writer of the stories says they're instructional:
... their author, Amelia Hamilton, a conservative blogger, has called them lessons in gun safety.

“The stories are really also for adults, and it’s all about safety,” Ms. Hamilton said in an interview on “CBS This Morning” on Friday. “It’s for parents to start those conversations.”
Gun control advocates describe them in terms that were once used for the old "Joe Camel" cigarette ads:
“The intent here is to create future customers” for the gun industry, said [Ladd] Everitt [of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence]. “I think it is wholly a marketing thing.”

Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, agreed, calling the stories “a disgusting, morally depraved marketing campaign.”
But neither side talks about how heavy-handed the propaganda is in these tales. This is from "Hansel and Gretel":
“What will we do,” their mother cried, “if we can’t feed our family through the winter?” Hansel and Gretel made a plan to help their family.

Fortunately, they had been taught how safely to use a gun and had been hunting with their parents most of their lives. They knew that, deep in the forest, there were areas that had never been hunted where they may be able to hunt for food. They knew how to keep themselves safe should they find themselves in trouble. The next morning, before dawn, they left a note for their parents, and gathered their hunting gear. They headed into the forest, grateful that they had the skills to help their family, and were old enough to go out on their own.
And from "Little Red Riding Hood":
The wolf leaned in, jaws open wide, then stopped suddenly. 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. He realized that Grandmother hadn’t been backing away from him; she had been moving towards her shotgun to protect herself and her home.

“I don't think I’ll be eaten today,” said Grandma, “and you won't be eating anyone again.” Grandma kept her gun trained on the wolf, who was too scared to move. Before long, he heard a familiar voice call “Grandmother, I’m here!” Red peeked her head in the door. 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.
This is indoctrinating children into the notion of gun ownership as an ideology. What do these ideological rewrites remind me of? Oh, yeah -- this:



Also see this AP story from 1954:



Young Pioneers of Gun-ism, it is imperative that you learn correct gun thinking! You will be the future leaders who will vanquish the anti-gun oppressor! You have a world to win!

7 comments:

Yastreblyansky said...

They're really determined to kill satire.

sdhays said...

I think the Soviet version of Snow White sounds more interesting than the original.

retiredeng said...

This is pretty depraved stuff. Fairy tales are stories you read to toddlers and preschoolers. What sort of demented mind dreams this up?

Now, how about they add guns to a more adult fairy tale like Beeping Slutey? That's more their speed.

Ten Bears said...

I can't think of anything L Ron Hubbard wrote that's worth reading* (sadly, I've read a baker's dozen), but he did prove that an entire religion can be cooked up out of thin air. Or pulled from the neather regions of human anatomy. Prostitution may well be the world's eldest profession, but playing mind games runs a close second.

The Science of Propaganda. Quite possibly the most churlishly dismissed out of hand as conspiracy theory of all the sciences. People just can't cognitively grasp they are being herded, or what it takes to do the herding.

I didn't cook up "sprawled drooling Pavlovianly across a 'couch' the backseat out of a nineteen and seventy-one Chevy Suburban stone to the bone on the Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and crotch-shots on Fox Kool-Aid" to be funny.

*Though his decology was better than Game of Thrones.

StringOnAStick said...

The efforts to create the entirely closed wingnut society apparently continue apace. Obviously nothing bad can ever come of this...

Grung_e_Gene said...

If this was an accurate depiciton of gun use by children, Hansel would negligently shoot Gretel just like the numerous incidents of children shooting children here.

Victor said...

And they killed happily ever after...