Little Red Riding Hood (Has A Gun): The NRA Is Re-Writing Classic Fairy Tales Into Pro-Gun Propaganda

Part of growing up is realizing that our favorite childhood fairytales are actually pretty darn disturbing. The way to solve the violence and horror in “Little Red Riding Hood,” then? Give everyone guns! At least if you follow the NRA‘s logic.

According to the Washington Post, the NRA has had the writer Amelia Hamilton arm the child heroes of this and other fairytales, in order to teach children about gun safety and the importance of arming themselves. So, in her version of “Hansel and Gretel,” the eponymous characters are hunting with–you guessed it–firearms, when they discover unarmed children being held captive by that cannibalistic witch. This is apparently a nicer and more empowering version than the original, where Hansel and Gretel are abandoned to starve to death, and are then made into a meal by the witch, you know, because they didn’t have guns with which to protect themselves.

And in the NRA kid-friendly version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” Grandma has a gun, so she doesn’t get eaten: “[The wolf] realized that Grandmother hadn’t been backing away from him; she had been moving towards her shotgun to protect herself and her home,” an excerpt goes.

The message here is unmistakable: teach your children how to use guns safely, and they can protect themselves from the big bad world. The problem with fairytales and other stories is that you can basically write them to suit any viewpoint you want. This what people under the #NRAFairyTales hashtag have proven:

In addition, children picking up firearms is a real gun safety problem. Just ask the Florida mom whose son shot her in the back.

(via Washington Post)