Last month, we interviewed children’s authoress, Amelia Hamilton. Her reimagined renditions of well-loved fairy tales, published by the National Rifle Association, have raised more than a few eyebrows.
In Hamilton’s versions, the characters, like Red Riding Hood, are armed. The result? Granny doesn’t get eaten, and everyone lives happily ever after.
With outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Daily Show picking up her stories, Hamilton received more than her fair share of hate. All too obvious is that the haters never read the fairy tales in their newly armed glory before responding to them.
Hamilton told Legal Insurrection in March:
The negative reactions have mostly been knee-jerk reactions and made it abundantly clear that these esteemed critics didn’t bother to read the stories before judging them. It’s easy to tell, because the anger is directed towards things that never happened, such as the wolf or the witch getting shot (spoiler alert: neither does) or because they’re too violent for kids (when these stories remove all of the violence from incredibly violent source material).
Facts and things become unimportant when there’s a For The Children™ agenda involved. Apparently.
Last week, The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence released a disgusting “PSA” addressing Hamilton’s stories. In The Brady Campaign’s version of Alice in Wonderland, Alice shoots herself in the face with a pistol.
“Over one-third of all American households have a gun,” says the ad as Alice shoots herself. “Ask your neighbor: Is there a gun where they play? Asking saves kids.”
“The Brady Campaign’s student group Generation Lockdown is raising awareness about the danger of guns in the home in response to the #NRAFairyTales efforts to market guns to children by arming classic fairy tale characters. This video is, sadly, much closer to the truth,” they claim.
Market guns to children? Hamilton’s renditions illustrate how being armed, knowledgeable, and capable of protecting one’s self and others deters violence.
“I wish we lived in a world where people would actually, you know, read the stories before deciding what’s in them, but people see the anything about a gun and react without becoming informed. Stories like mine should help people to see that guns are not scary monsters, but the “haters” have already made up their minds based on misinformation,” said Hamilton.
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