The Brady Campaign wants to keep guns out of the hands of your children, and they’ll shoot your kids’ favorite fairy tale characters in the face if they have to to do it.
Several weeks ago, NRA Family (yes, there’s an NRA Family site—the National Rifle Association believes arming yourself is a group affair) released a series of what they called #NRAFairyTales. These “fractured” traditional tales portary recognizable characters like Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel safely using small arms to change the course of their formerly grim stories. Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, for instance, shoots the wolf before he ever has a chance to eat our heroine, and Hansel and Gretel use their firearms know-how to free children from the clutches of a wicked witch (and feed the village in the process).
Obviously, the stories were controversial. They’re meant to serve as a way for parents to introduce gun safety—and gun culture—to children, but were widely perceived, by left-leaning press, as a way to market the use of firearms to children.
There would, of course, be a number of forceful ways to respond to such an effort logically, calmly and with reason. But the Brady Campaign, and its student arm, the menacingly named Generation Lockdown, chose to take a less conventional route and filmed a commercial where Alice in Wonderland, chasing the white rabbit through her home, finds a gun in a wardrobe and accidentally shoots her own face off.
Given that the Brady Campaign could have approached this more thoughtfully, in a way that might have earned them less publicity, it’s clear that they were going for maximum impact through terrifying violence. It’s an effect they achieved.
In a sense, as the #NRAFairyTales author Amelia Hamilton pointed out on Twitter, the Brady Campaign’s video actually proves the NRA’s point that better, earlier instruction on gun safety—and the many, useful aspects of firearms training—might have a preventative effect. If only Alice had been taught to shoot rabbits, instead of follow them, she’d have known what to do with the handgun she found.
