“Make no mistake, this is a disgusting, morally depraved marketing campaign. The NRA continues to stoop to new lows in the hopes of shoving guns into America’s youngest hands. If nothing else, this approach demonstrates just how desperate the organization has become to sell more guns — it must now advertise deadly weapons to kids by perverting childhood classics with no regard whatsoever for the real life carnage happening every day.” – Brady Campaign president Dan Gross in Oh Grandmother, what a big gun you have: The NRA rewrites classic fairy tales [at washingtonpost.com]
How is this any different than Hollywood making a movie about Noah’s ark and claiming it was caused by global warming? Or a movie about a gay Jesus? Or some other idiotic nonsense? Besides Little Red Riding Hood will be sort of a non-story if granny was packing.
Nra version
Little red riding hood was carrying a picnic basket to grandma’s house. Along the way she met a wolf. The wolf rushed to grandma’s house where he was shot by granny. Little red riding hood and grandma had a wonderful day at her cottage, where they talked about how mean the wolf was. Little red riding hood went home happy knowing grandma was alive and remembered fondly that day in the woods years later of the wonderful day with grandma. The end.
every town for whatever safety version
Little red riding hoods grandma lived in a dangerous part of the woods filled with wolves, so grandma decided to apply for a gun license. Initially the police didn’t want to give granny a license citing her age, but she persisted. While she was waiting the customary 3-4 months while the police sat on her application for her license, a wolf came to her house and ate her. Little red riding hood came across the carnage later that day and ended up spending the rest of her life in an insane asylum caused by the carnage of seeing her dead grandma getting eaten by the wolf. The end.
You forgot the part where grandma calls the police and follows her duty to retreat her own house, and they show up in time to save her, but not before the wolf burns his mouth on grandmas cookies and sues grandma and wins a huge settlement, according to bloomberg.
“How is this any different than Hollywood making a movie about Noah’s ark and claiming it was caused by global warming? Or a movie about a gay Jesus?”
Because a woman shooting and killing a wolf isn’t ridiculous.
Actually the fairy tales in their current form have already been dumbed down and sanatized…and still they are jam packed with violence, canabalism, and revenge.
The issue here is not the guns but the NRA. The fairy tales have been rewritten many times for many different audiences from preschoolers to pornographers. Adding guns is not a novel twist except for the fact that it was done for reasons other than entertainment. But, of course, the tales themselves were originally allegories about life and wrapped in a pretty package that would reveal itself to the reader when they were mature enough to understand the implications.
The NRAs version, however, reads,like blatant two-dimensional advertising similar to when Disney got ahold of Winnie The Poo and lowered the vocbulary and sugar coated the heartache.
I’m not sure what that’s supposed to have to do with my comment.
Here’s a Volvo ad drawing on Little Red Ridinghood. There are thousands of similar uses of fairy tales and myths in advertising. Are they #problematic?
http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7785/2013-volvo-s60-t5-little-red-riding-hood
Oh yes, if average people actually ever read those fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm…
I think they would be apoplectic about Sleeping Beauty alone. There was a little more than a kiss involved, not to mention she doesn’t wake up until after she gives birth to the twins, It was the king, and he was still married, and the queen finds out, and plans to kill the twins (and feed them to the king) and burn the princess at the stake, and the king kills the queen so he can marry the princess…
And they live happily ever after!
Basile’s original tale is far more interesting than the water-down slop of Disney films.
I think these things are awesome. A lot of stories depend on characters being passive victims and these re-imagined fairy tales turn that idea completely on its head.
Referring back to the Hollywood comment above – the majority of script writers and directors of TV and movies could not figure out how to make an interesting story that went more than ten of fifteen minutes without the omnipresent unarmed victims for the antagonists to prey upon. Their story lines almost universally rely on armed government agents to avenge the deceased victims and eventually capture the evil-doer. And for good measure the government agents will try their damndest to arrest the Bad Guy and “bring him to justice” even when they have ample and justified opportunities to shoot the bastard down in his(her) tracks. If they do shoot the bastard then they spend months in counselling and/or go off the deep end and are never again useful in their profession.
NYPD Blue was an exception to the rule, which is probably why it was so successful. Those guys frequently dealt (often harshly) with low-life, low IQ scumbags, not criminal masterminds. Justified also comes to mind. And Dirty Harry. The success of these shows and movies seems to indicate the type of law enforcement people actually want. If they could only come up with a way to include non-LEO gun owners in the stories that would be ideal. Sorry, The Walking Dead does not qualify on this basic level, although portraying individuals using guns to defend themselves and their families is a good thing, IMO.
Dan Gross is a worthless choad; and it’s not ad hominem if it’s true.
I disagree. Dan Gross is simply projecting his own morally depraved and disgusting belief in allowing evil men to attack, rape pillage and plunder defenseless men, women and children.
The hundreds of millions murdered in the last hundred years by statists that people like dan Gross helped to disarm, cry out from the grave. The images of the concentration camps and the furnaces of Hitler, the Gulags of Stalin and the systematic starvation of millions in the Ukraine, the killing fields of Cambodia, the tens of millions murdered by Mao, ad nauseum.
In the end, Dan Gross empowers those that are evil, to do evil upon the innocent; so logically, that makes Dan Gross and all those like him, evil.
Except for that last bit, I disagree. Dan Gross does NOT do what he does for any moral reason AT ALL. Dan Gross does what he does for money. Period.
It is still ad hominem in that it is directed at the person and not the argument. But when the persons carachter is of question and relevant to the topic the tactic becomes valid
It’s only an Ad Hominem argument if it is, in fact, an argument – that is to say if it’s intended to discredit his position. Otherwise it’s just verbal abuse, and richly deserved in this case
His statements are simply silly, and not worthy of a response, so let’s just cuss him out.
Some things are off limits. Children’s Classics are one of those areas. If we as gun owners cannot promote our cause to the public and our children regarding firearm ownership without changing classic children’s stories then we are failing miserably.
How does one fail a cause by rewriting a fairly tale, when opponents spend every moment lying about our right to lawfully protect ourselves?
The failure is a spewing a narrative that allows rape, robbery, murder and every depraved act against citizens by restricting lawful gun ownership.
Art doesn’t have limits.
If I might point out, childhood “classics” aren’t exactly sacred- we’ve rewritten them several times to fit our societal agenda. One of the original Cinderella stories, I forget which, had the stepsisters cutting down their feet to fit in the glass slipper and then having their eyes pecked out by birds. Sleeping Beauty was impregnated by Prince Charming and only woke after having children. The list continues on.
Jaffas, I disagree. The entire purpose for the invention of these fairy tales was to condition children to the idea that they were to remain helpless and depend on “woodsmen” or whatever to protect them from evil. Those stories never continued to encourage anyone to *become* woodsmen, just to pretend they magically existed and put all their faith in them. They need to be reimagined in light of the fact that, today, you do not have to be a powerful man to wield the weapons which can defeat the big, bad wolf.
The current pablum-ized nonsense we’ve seen for the last 60-ish years? Sure.
The source material had been around for who knows how long before the brothers Grimm collected it up, and published in early 1800s.
If you had a Disney childhood, you can kill it (or cleanse it depending on your viewpoint) by reading Grimm’s fairy Tales.
In some early versions of the tale, the wolf tricks the girl into eating her grandmother. In some the girl is eaten by the wolf. In others the girl is rescued by an armed woodsman. The story was hardly pristine when the NRA got to it.
Yep. The version I always heard as a kid had a woodsman killing the wolf with an axe after Red tricked the beast into revealing itself. But then I grew up in a rural community where people were routinely prepared to take care of such beasties in protection of crops and herds.
“The better to eat you with, my dear. ” *chop*
So how do you feel about the Liberals re-writing Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to eliminate “racist” dialogue? As though an accurate accounting of historical attitudes towards blacks and Indians is somehow harmful to their descendants.
I don’t really “feel” anything about it. Though I will point out that altering an intact work produced by as single author is inherently different than changing a story that is already an amalgam of other tales. There’s also a difference between altering fictional plot elements and changing factually accurate elements of a story due to irrational offense.
Adding a simple tool changes the outcome of horror. How is this a bad thing? We live in an age of whiners and grievance peddlers. Time for our only response to the Brady gangsters should be go screw your self.
I don’t know that the NRA is trying to tap into the market of toddlers and children, so much as responding to what some of their member parents might be interested in showing their children. Not really a big deal, the more the anti’s cry, the more desperate/asinine they look.
Or just engaging in a little championship level trolling.
Here’s a good one; 100,000,000 people who were murdered by their government actually had the means to resist their socialist killers, and waged a decades long guerilla war of attrition that ended with the death of communism and the end of poverty for the now capitalist world.
Sigh.
When I first heard about this issue, it was “Hansel and Gretel with Guns, Oh My!”
Which of course made me think, “Hollywood did that three years ago”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1428538/
If classic bedtime stories are fair game when you want to make a buck, why is it not allowable to use them in a fight for civil rights???
Because it’s the NRA doing it, and when the NRA so much as puts non-dairy creamer in its coffee it’s an outrageous immoral offense against innocent cows.
Dan Gross would prefer that home invaders maul grandmothers to death while waiting on little girls to investigate so they can do God knows what with them.
See? Sensationalist drivel works both ways, hoplophobes.
I for one enjoy the idea of these books. I plan on getting a set and of course the original fairy tales as well for my kids. I just don’t see any harm in showing children the responsible and appropriate use for firearms. I think one of the irresponsible and inappropriate approaches to children and firearms is letting them play games like grand theft auto where they can shoot innocent people in the streets with an arsenal of weapons. That is a terrible depiction of firearms and does not promote what responsible gun ownership is.
Also… The antis are such ridiculous people…
So blaming video games is somehow better than blaming fairy tales? I played a LOT of Grand Theft Auto as a preteen and young teenager, and SOMEHOW I never ended up going on murder sprees with the firearms readily available in my parents’ home. Maybe it had something to do with a moral upbringing and learning gun safety at an early age, who knows?
Most kids can distinguish fantasy from reality. Blame poor parenting, not entertainment.
No no no. Not blaming videogames. I as well played grand theft auto as a child. Not at fairy tale reading age though. My point is the comparison between a fairy tale with responsible gun ownership (ie. Using a gun to defend your home) vs the 5 year old shooting people in a video game. Which one is doing more “harm” to a child. I have nothing against violent videogames, i dont play them anymore, but i do believe that some games are too much for a child in the fairy tale reading age. Talking like 3 – 7 or 8 here.
Thank you, Dan Gross, for placing an ad for the NRA fairy tales (with direct links to NRAfamily.org) in the Washington Post. The best kind of advertising is the free kind!
It’s nice that they are so desperate that they need to go after these stories to blame for the increase in the popularity of guns.
I’m a fan of the politically correct Christmas Story series myself.
“You’ll shoot your eye out!”
Anything that gets the hoplophobes knickers twisted that much has got to be a good thing!
“… with no regard whatsoever for the real life carnage happening every day.” – Brady Campaign president Dan Gross
Wait, is Mr. Gross talking about people who use firearms to illegally harm others? Or is he talking about the moral depravity of his organizations’s efforts to make everyone defenseless in light of the violent attacks perpetrated on good people every day?
If they think the NRA version is bad, they should read the originals. Morbid doesn’t begin to cover it. (SPOILER ALERT: Most end with somebody horribly disfigured and/or dead)
The NRA should remake Halloween. Turn it into a 5 minute short where Mr. Meyers takes a bullet to the dome before credits roll.
Do this to horror movies, they’re basically advertisements for gun ownership as they are.
I was pleasantly surprised to see this WaPo article is actually relatively balanced, with just as much commentary from the pro-gun side as the anti. And most of the anti quotes were hysterical nonsense, while the pro-rights folks came off as reasoned and stable. They also gave our side the last word for once.
Notice how they get extra huffy and wee-wee’d up when normalized guns infiltrate the dream world they’ve been weaving? Those retellings are excellent persuaders. Somebody in the pro-side is getting a clue.
The classics can’t have guns for the same reason open / closed / whatever carry can’t be permitted, and why the harmless father picking up his kid has to be shadowed and escorted like some perp. “Guns bad, and un-normal.” has to be programmed in before the thinking parts of the brain. Anything that breaks that programming is double-plus ungood.
And the agency, autonomy, and effectiveness of the designated victims when armed has to be squelched. We can’t have people thinking they can do things themselves.
Worst (or best) those thoughtcrimes are connected to stories everybody knows, propagating in the culture and replaying in people’s brains auto-magically. They reinforce a contrary assumption bubble in which “disarm everybody” makes no sense.
I get how the anti’s would prefer stories of horror and passive victims. I wonder, though, what with the Katness in The Hunger Games, or the girl-power retellings of Cinderella and Snow White, what the hell they thought would happen? Teaching the client classes autonomy never works out well for the patrons. Sisters Doin It For Themselves might decide for themselves that they have a right to whatever they think would help, including a gun.
Lighten up Linda. Is this a micro-aggression? Or macro? How about the current fairy tale of Bury Soetoro? If you like your doctor… (My paranoid friend just told me the gubmint is declaring martial law and Bury will stay in power for at least a 3rd term). That’ll bring out some firepower Red…
How is this any different than the pervasive propaganda espoused in academia and the mass media demonizing firearms?
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
You can tell a lot about the effectiveness of an organization by the vitriol and rage with which it’s opponents condemn it. One can only imagine this fellow at the Brady Center becoming visibly red-faced and having a spike in his blood pressure while writing about this. This image brings me joy. Well done, NRA. Keep up the good work.
Since when has the NRA sold guns? I want one.
Why do you hate empowered women Brady Campaign? Your misogyny is showing!
We’re not desperate to sell guns. Obama is doing just fine on his own.
He is the greatest firearm salesman EVER, and keeps breaking his own records with each passing year.
aren’t the non disney versions of these tales pretty Grimm? (pardon the pun)