I’m an American, so watching people be wrong and crazy with a gun is a big part of my life. It’s almost expected. So if you write a kid’s book about the importance of having guns everywhere, that’s not crazy to me. That’s like a book about having a friend in corn syrup. Save the ink, maniacs, you already won. But if you write a children’s gun book with no plot, resolution, or moral? That’s starting to get interesting to me. And I’m sorry, did you say they were all furries? Like very clearly, no possible other thing, fucksuit animal people? Holy shit, okay, let’s read it.
WHY MOMMY CARRIES A GUN (2018) is the second book in the AMERICAN SHEEPDOGS universe, and you already know what it says inside. It’s all the disappointing things terrible people say after tragic events, illustrated by a pervert for an editor too Christian to know that.
It was written by the author of Bulletproof Marriage, Army Lt. Col Dave Grossman, and a woman who is not his wife, Stephanie Rogish. Dave Grossman trains in gun karate and literally teaches classes on what it’s like to kill. These are just fun facts, but also worth keeping in mind as we read how in this great nation where you’re free to do anything you want, Dave Grossman has only ever chosen to kill people, imagine killing people, and teach others about killing people. This book will try to do all three, but statistically speaking, has the best chance at the first one.
As I mentioned earlier, you already know what this book’s going to say. God made the 2nd Amendment so your assassin can be killed with a nearby gun, and this is all settled freedom science. Again, these arguments are background America noise. They’re the terms of service we all signed when we agreed to Hulk Hogan’s Pastamania. So let’s talk more about Lt. Col Grossman. He’s a top killologist academic as I mentioned, and is very proud to have coined the term “sheepdogs.” See, “sheepdogs” are armed civilians who kill “wolves” who are armed civilians in order to protect the “sheep,” who didn’t bring their gun to Burger King. It’s kind of like how you’d describe people on a Grindr profile, only for murder? For instance, I protect my liberty with throwing stars, so I’d be a “porcupine,” but I shave down the skin, so I’m also a “wet daddy otter” who “will spit in your dirty mouth.”
Now let’s learn even more about the authors of WHY MOMMY CARRIES A GUN.
Oh, Dave’s co-author is married to a cop. So then MOMMY CARRIES A GUN because there’s a man in her home who tries to de-escalate every conflict with a chokehold. She’s also looking forward to getting back to America and her gun rights, which means she’s not carrying a gun? What country is she in? Why won’t they let her have a gun!? Isn’t she disproving her own book every moment she doesn’t die in that gunless shithole? Ha ha that smug joke combined with America’s never-ending gun violence to change her mind, right? No? Shit. Well, maybe there’s something ridiculous enough to talk about inside the pro-death manifesto for kids featuring furry versions of American gun heroes Stephanie co-wrote with a black belt in “the martial art of the gun.”
Despite making the most notable contributions to this project by far, the illustrator barely gets mentioned on the bio page. They say this book was the first step toward Jacob achieving his dream of being a professional Animation Artist, but Google tells me he works at an airport and never drew a second thing. So young illustrators, when you’re four years out of art school and your first paid gig is a right wing children’s book, and then you accidentally make it look like a storyboard for a werewolf porno, you might have what it takes to be an assistant workforce administrator at Spirit Airlines.
I mentioned WHY MOMMY CARRIES A GUN had no plot or moral, and I wasn’t lying, but it does sort of try to tell a story. It starts with a dog monster named Mrs. Shepherd who hears a knock on her door and gets uneasy. Like any good gun owner, she solves this feeling of unease by drawing her fucking gun. Keep in mind this is a work of fiction written by people who want us all to have guns. This world, where doors are answered with guns and dogs have human tits, is the best, most correct universe they can imagine.
With her handgun next to the wagging tail poking through the crotch hole of her skintight jeans, Mrs. Shepherd prepares to shoot her visitor dead. She thinks about what she’ll tell her husband when he gets home. “Get inside, fuck, fuck I killed the fucking neighbor right in front of the boy,” probably.
It turned out to be nothing, which seems like a good time to bring something up. Out of all these “sheepdogs” who are hoping to execute a home intruder, roughly 100% of them will die of loneliness or gun accident before they get the chance. But it feels like they won’t. This dog minotaur bought a gun and is so desperate for there to be a reason for it, she will pull it on knocking doors. Every stranger is a potential threat. Every suspicious movement is a justified kill. And while it’s scary these people hold life and death in their hands, I feel like we can trust the judgment of someone who sees gunfighting furries for kids and thinks, “This book represents my values, what was that noise, I have an idea, shoot it.”
My point is, pulling a gun might be an overreaction to “KNOCK KNOCK.” At least two times out of three.
As she tucks Max into bed, he casually asks if she had to kill a man. Which, wait, that means this kid watched her dig her pistol out of her purse and then left to go to bed? How often does this lady pull a gun on visitors that her kid is like, “I’m calling it a night, mom! See you when you’re done with this. Let me know if this one turns out to be a murderer! Oh, haha, I guess I’ll hear the gunsh– hey, I’m taking the last of the milk!“
Despite him not being a bad person, Mrs. Shepherd still tells her kid about how she would have absolutely, happily shot him. She kisses Max and explains the man wasn’t a threat, but oh my god, imagine how dead he’d be if he was, and again he wasn’t a bad person, but maybe mommy should go hunt him down just in case because mommy has spent a lot of time imagining him hurting her little pup, and only a crazy mommy would do that if he was innocent, and mommy isn’t crazy, mommy would die for her pups, mommy isn’t crazy.
The potential hostile tango at the door turned out to only be a salesman, and I disagree with this book even more. A door-to-door salesman at 8pm? Pull the trigger, dog lady. Leave the body where it lands and tell 123FriendlyPane Window Treatments to come pick up their trash. If I answer the door at 8pm and you’re holding a stack of pamphlets, you’d fucking better be there to kill my family. I will lay down my life to make sure your final sales pitch is the sound of your bones snapping!! Whoa, is this what being a sheepdog feels like? This feels amazing.
What’s so great about this gun nut fantasy is how, aside from the dog people, they’re hilariously careful to keep things realistic. No one foils a convenient store robbery or puts a round into a kidnapper. They walk around with their guns, talk about their guns, sometimes pull out their guns, and it’s all for nothing. Or maybe less than nothing, since now the ice cream shop won’t let them inside. “Open carry lunatics like us aren’t welcome in most places, son! But they’re the wrong ones, not us! Ice cream is safer w– hey, are you looking at my son!? Halt for citizen execution! Halt or I will open f– damn, they escaped in that school bus. What was I saying, Max? Oh, right. Those ice cream sons of bitches with their little sticker will fucking wish we ignored stickers when some madman with a gun does show up!”
Max, who was raised by two of these deranged dog people, has already rationalized getting kicked out of the ice cream shop. Buying a waffle cone without a gun wasn’t worth the risk, he decided. Max won’t be one more child lost to ice cream shop gun violence eternally asking, “Where were all the other guns!?”
So Max and his unwelcome father “decide” to go to the park instead where they discuss guns, crime, and guns. “He is feeling safe,” decide the authors. Surrounded by potential snipers, he pictures his father pumping bullets into the head of an ice cream robber and rests against the bulging warmth of his loaded gun. “You’re sex fetish monsters,” Jacob the illustrator reminds them.
By the way, here’s the answer key to the book’s hidden Bible verses. It’s not exactly the Da Vinci Code, though. It demonstrates Stephanie and Dave’s faith in their reader’s intelligence when they explain “Luke 11:21” is a coded reference to the Bible verse “Luke 11:21.” It’s as if they’re saying, “You’re dumb as shit, a straight up tooth-brained idiot, but everyone is safer if you have a gun. Wait, does that make sense? Hold on one second. God, are we right? Okay, never mind, God said we’re right.”
Guns are necessary and right, which has been proven from Max’s mom almost killing a solicitor, his dad getting kicked out of an ice cream shop, and somehow God, so now it’s time to look at the downside. In some situations, guns can be a little bit dangerous! For instance, Max is over at the Barkers’ house and their dad left one of his handguns out on the kitchen table. To be fair, his phone did ring and it’s hard to assign blame in exceptional circumstances like these. But what this means is that the most passionate gun advocates, while trying to convince you how safe it is to have them everywhere, still think, “Oh for sure, you can’t even answer your phone with these things around. Chatty people are definitely going to want to have a few backup kids.”
You have to admit, Stephanie and Dave are not glamorizing the open carry furry lifestyle. These people are shunned, living in constant fear, and just absolutely gaping with holes.
Those are the three stories included in the book! “The Unshocking Case of the Guy At the Door,” “Sir, I Told You You Can’t Fucking Come In Here With That Gun,” and “RING RING BANG BANG: I Miss My Curious, Furry Boy.” The next eight pages are just the dog children reciting talking points the authors remember from a few hundred mass shootings ago. Maybe they’re right, though. Maybe the guns will be safe in the hands of the extremely paranoid people who can’t tell this book is nuts.
Dave and Stephanie’s closing argument is that guns are great because they’re the same security the President uses! Then Jacob makes the hauntingly strange decision to draw an x-ray shot of every dog’s hidden firearm. It’s the utopia we’ve always dreamed of… secret guns inches away from every impulsive child in the belts of much, much more impulsive adults. “Sometimes it feels like my Butch is still here with me,” says Mr. Barker at the boy-sized empty space beside him. He tries to make it look like his lips aren’t moving as his voice raises in pitch. “I ann, hather! I cane dack to horgivhh you!”
“Get away from my baby or I will shoot you dead,” replies a sexy nearby collie. Her voice raises in pitch, “Yes, a righteous kill is the only way to consecrate the gun that killed ne, nother!”
Alright, look, we’re all having fun with the ventriloquist ghosts of the dog children taken from us too soon, but things are about to get serious. WHY MOMMY CARRIES A GUN ends with a section called FAMOUS AMERICAN HEROES WHO WERE SHEEPDOGS, and most of us will die in an ice cream shop gunfight before we ever again see this many bad, random, and horny ideas collide.
This is precisely what you expected and yet it’s still hard to believe it’s happening, isn’t it? A black belt in gunkata wrote a little bio for revered WWII hero, Audie Murphy, and then Jacob drew Audie’s fursona killing Nazis from a burning tank. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman teaches adult killers how to deal with the trauma of taking a human life, and at least one of them knows he did this. That’s got to be like seeing your therapist sprinting into the emergency room with his dick stuck in a bowling ball.
Cris Kyle, who usually spelled it Chris, shot a lot of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, then came home and shot a lot more in Louisiana and Texas. Maybe? A lot of his kills turned out to be lies. He lied so much he cost his widow $1.8 million in defamation lawsuits (reduced to an undisclosed amount after appeal). “We should leave that stuff out of the Chris Kyle bio,” suggested Stephanie. “Mmm, Cris was a naughty little Shiba Inu,” replied Lt. Col Dave Grossman.
Another great American gun owner honored here is Eleanor Roosevelt. “Make her fursona a little bit less fuckable than the others, out of respect for the office,” the authors told Jacob. And if I’m understanding this correctly, she had no idea how to use a gun, had no permit for one, yet the safety professionals sworn to keep her husband alive gave her a pistol and “begged her” to carry it? Is history sure they got all the details right on that? Anyway, what a tribute. The first lady of the United States as an Old English Sheepdog Mr. Rogers firing blind into the North Lawn with a revolver. They’ll never top it.
Oh no. This picture of furry Harriet Tubman means the authors brainstormed on what kind of dog Harriet Tubman would be, and instead of realizing this was all a mistake, they decided on “the blackest one.” Maybe their choice has nothing to do with race. Maybe “sexually open to whatever Rottweiler” is the best way to represent this American hero. I’m not saying I have all the solutions. I’m only saying I’m smart enough to never put myself in a situation where I have to answer, “What kind of furry would Harriet Tubman be?”
There are many heroes they didn’t have time to honor, so the authors included this blank page. Is there someone you admire who has taken a life and whom you would have sex with as a dog? Let them know by drawing them with a gun, as a dog! Exactly as Harriet Tubman would have loved!
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