By: Teresa Mull

HBO is planning to edit an iconic cartoon character in an absurd way. Elmer Fudd, the loveable, bumbling hunter who always fell victim to Bugs Bunny’s trickery, will be carrying a scythe instead of a rifle, The Hill reports.

Peter Browngardt, series executive producer and showrunner of the relaunch on HBO Max, told The New York Times:

"We’re not doing guns. But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in.”

The Hill further reports:

[C]omics artist Johnny Ryan, who worked on the show, noted to the Times that he believes “We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along.”

“‘Looney Tunes’ is pretty much the antithesis of that,” he said. “It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”

The reboot will not be the first in the entertainment world to eliminate guns from its production.

In 2016, the cast of the musical “Hamilton” chose not to use guns during its performance at the Tony Awards in the wake of the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

Eliminating guns, even from cartoons, will not stop violence, of course. In England, guns are banned almost completely. And after criminals moved to knives, England moved to restrict those, too.

According to Gov.uk:

It’s illegal to: sell a knife to anyone under 18, unless it has a folding blade 3 inches long (7.62 cm) or less. carry a knife in public without good reason, unless it has a folding blade with a cutting edge 3 inches long or less. carry, buy or sell any type of banned knife.

Despite these rules, The New York Post reported in July 2018:

Knife attacks and homicides have soared in parts of the UK — as the number of police officers has dropped, according to new statistics.

The total number of homicides, which includes murder and manslaughter, surged 12 percent from the previous year to 701 in England and Wales for the year ending in March, the Office for National Statistics said.

Police-recorded knife crimes have also ballooned 16 percent to 40,147.

Gun crime saw a 2 percent uptick with 6,492 offenses over the same time period.

The repetitive “ban this, ban that!” mentality is maddening and deadly.

Who else is extra grateful we won The War for American Independence 236 years ago?

Photo Credit: By Warner Brothers – Taken from a public domain cartoon – 1943’s To Duck or Not to Duck, which introduced the character to the Looney Tunes series., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18395326

Teresa Mull is editor of Gunpowder Magazine. Contact her at [email protected].