Now they’re after cartoon guns, and not the realistic-looking stuff in popular “first-person shooter” video games like “Call of Duty” and “Battlefield,” but the guns used by classic Looney Tunes characters.
HBO actually disarmed both Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam in a new series of cartoons they developed with the classic Looney Toons cast of animated characters for HBO Max.
When asked where the guns were, the executive producer of the new series, Peter Browngardt, told The New York Times: “We’re not doing guns. But we can do cartoony violence—TNT, the Acme stuff. All of that was kind of grandfathered in.”
So dynamite is grandfathered in for Fudd, but not guns?
No doubt, Elmer Fudd will still deliver his unforgettable line: “Shhh, be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits.” Now though, he won’t have his trusty, double-barrel shotgun—and Joe Biden told us double-barrel shotguns are the one gun that he thinks are politically correct.
Still, Fudd is allowed, according to HBO’s politically correct rules, to use a giant scythe as a weapon. (Oh, to have some audio of that discussion at HBO.)
Fudd (and Bugs Bunny) can also blow each other up with dynamite! Yeah, these politically correct rules sure are funny and flippant things.
In a 1½-minute clip from a cartoon titled “Dynamite Dance” that Warner Bros. put on YouTube, Elmer Fudd chases Bugs Bunny with that scythe, but Bugs, being the rascally rabbit that he is, soon jams a stick of dynamite in Fudd’s mouth. Bugs, in fact, in the proceeding seconds, continues to blow up Fudd with more and more dynamite to the lively beat of Amilcare Ponchielli’s nineteenth-century melody “Dance of the Hours.”
If this cartoon is a good example of what HBO has done, it has the look and feel of the classic Looney Tunes, though at a more frantic pace—perhaps designed for the shortened attention spans of this smartphone generation.
In these new cartoons, gun-control has also banned Yosemite Sam’s trusty revolvers. That’s a shame, as they were magical six-shooters that never ran out of ammunition—well, until some joke in the plot called for an empty chamber, anyway.
It should be said that neither Elmer Fudd nor Yosemite Sam ever practiced safe gun handling. Both would be instantly kicked off any gun range in America. Actually, in real life, both would quickly find themselves involuntarily institutionalized and would have their Second Amendment rights abrogated, altogether, under current law. But that’s reality, which is something these cartoons were never supposed to represent. Looney Tunes was supposed to be an over-the-top silly diversion no one took too seriously.
But that’s the thing about political correctness today; it is not rational; it does not have a sense of humor; and, in all its contradictions, it abhors our constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Still, what’s really funny is that HBO has unwittingly—unless they are trolling us, which seems very unlikely—given us a technicolor metaphor for the absurdity of Hollywood’s political correctness.
What’s not funny though, is that this convoluted view of all things related to guns coming out of Hollywood and the mainstream media is affecting us in real life. To name just two examples: In America today, a six-year-old boy might be suspended from the first grade if he uses his fingers to mimic a gun in a cops and robbers game; and, in these politically correct times, a teenage skeet champion might have a photo of her with her shotgun censored by a yearbook committee.
So, now, with HBO taking away Looney Tunes’ characters’ guns—though not their huge, sharp-looking scythes and TNT—we are all just supposed to shrug and go along with this contradictory treatment of America, as if this next step into PC madness had been foreshadowed so long ago it’s inevitable.
The thing is, in a free society, the cultural zeitgeist of a nation isn’t simply dictated by the elite—the tail doesn’t wag the dog. The growth of gun ownership in America has been continuing for decades, and is only accelerating in these uncertain times. A populace that knows firsthand about this practical right will have little trouble seeing the absurdity in this political correctness.
In just the first few months of 2020, for example, an estimated 2.5 million Americans have become new gun owners. If you are one of these new gun owners, or if you know any, please refer them to NRA’s resources, such as NRAInstructors.org, NRA Publications’ YouTube channel and the NRA’s Guide for New Shooters, which is available at NRAPublications.org.
