Fairy Tales About Guns

Earlier this year, the National Rifle Association illustrated how different some stories can be if a victim has a gun. Using some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales to make the point, author Amelia Hamilton retold stories like Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun) and Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns) to show not only that we don’t have to be victims, but sometimes “happily ever after” takes some securing.

Naturally, however, leftists had a conniption. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (truth in advertising warning: Campaign to Take Away Your Guns) responded with a fairy tale of their own featuring Alice in Wonderland … shooting herself in the face. “Over one-third of all American households have a gun,” a narrator says just as Alice pulls the trigger of a gun she’s discovered. “Ask your neighbor: Is there a gun where they play? Asking saves kids.”

In so far as this reminds all gun owners that gun safety is paramount, or that all parents of any stripe should go over the subject with their kids, this is all fine and good. But the vast majority of gun owners are conscious of this fact, despite what the Brady Campaign implies. For example, an experiment in February revealed that kids whose parents own guns do know what to do with them — don’t touch them — while kids in gun-free households didn’t fare so well. Of course, the Brady ad specifically aims to rebut the NRA, but had “Alice” been through the NRA’s Eddie Eagle Gun Safe Program, she would have known what to do when she found a gun.

Hamilton responded via Twitter, “Me: what if fairy tale characters were safe? Brady campaign: what if they shot themselves in the face?” That’s par for the course when it comes to the scaremongering Left.