For a year now, Elmer Fudd has been hunting Bugs Bunny without his shotgun, and I doubt that has given Bugs an advantage or neutralized any advantage Elmer might have had. For 80 years Fudd has been trying to kill Bugs, and his ineptitude could not be greater.
I’m not sure what Warner Bros. intended to accomplish by stripping Fudd of his shooting iron. After all, it was Joe Biden (as Vice President) who publicly advocated that when you are threatened, grab your double-barreled shotgun and fire off a couple of rounds into the air. So if Bugs ever turns the tables on Fudd, Fudd won’t have the self-defense tool Biden advocates.
Stripping the shotgun from Fudd certainly wasn’t to pull hunters away from a poor role model. I watched Looney Tunes as a kid, and I was an aspiring hunter, but Elmer was never a role model for me.
It wasn’t to reduce gun violence because there’s no connection between cartoon guns and actual violence. And even if there was, there’s plenty of cartoon violence that doesn’t involve cartoon guns. I was a fan of Popeye, and he certainly didn’t influence me to eat spinach (or to fight bullies).
It couldn’t have been to make guns less appealing to kids because Fudd is a complete failure, and what kid wants to be a complete failure? I doubt a single person could be found who used — or misused — a gun because of Elmer Fudd. Or even said, "Elmer Fudd has a shotgun. I want one too!"
This week’s column (July 12, 2021) is an update on Elmer Fudd's shotgun. Read it at the Jamestown (NY) Gazette.
To access more of my writing on hunting topics, go to the home page of my blog, Mission: Hunter.