Comedy Central talk show host Stephen Colbert aired a segment on his show August 5, 2014 making fun of the children’s picture book “My Parents Open Carry.”
Comedy Central talk show host Stephen Colbert—of the ”The Colbert Report”—ripped into children’s book My Parents Open Carry (White Feather Press), a pro-gun picture book about Brenna—a 13-year-old girl with parents who live the “open carry lifestyle”—on an episode of his show that aired on August 5.
“I wish there were more fire arms in children’s books,” joked Colbert during the segment. (Scroll down to view clip of “The Colbert Report” segment.)
My Parents Open Carry, by Brian Jeffs and Nathan Nephew, co-founders of the firearm rights nonprofit Michigan Open Carry, was first published in limited release in 2012 and was made available on Amazon in February 2014. (According to the Amazon website, Jeffs is also on the Board of Directors for the Second Amendment March, a nonprofit pro firearm rally march in Washington, DC and co-host of the “Saturday Afternoon Shootout,” an internet talk show on the—you guessed it—Second Amendment.)
While the book has been the topic of mockery for Colbert as well as Bill Mahrer, the talk show host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” White Feather Press founder Skip Coryell said, according to an August 4 article in the Guardian, “Sales were weak for the first few years. But after it was trashed on the [Bill Mahrer] show, sales have gone up.”
Of course, social media has fed the book’s hype and its ridicule. Elizabeth Law, the former-publisher of Egmont USA and now a publishing consultant, saw the cover of the book on Bill Mahrer’s August 1 show and tweeted the following:
For the first time in my 25 years in the biz, a children’s book leaves me speechless. pic.twitter.com/yrs3MQEH8g
— Elizabeth Law (@ElawReads) August 2, 2014
Law tells SLJ in an email, “When I got up the next morning, that [tweet] had been retweeted 1,100 times, and attention really took off from there. I started tweeting jokes about the cover, and suddenly, less than 24 hours after Bill Maher had put the cover up, a friend sent me this link on Raw Story which quoted my tweets.”
Jeffs and Nephew, both first-time authors, say they were “moved to write the book because they ‘looked for pro-gun children’s books and couldn’t find any,’ (according to the August 4 article in the Guardian). “My Parents Open Carry is,” say the authors, “written in the hope of providing a basic overview of the right to keep and bear arms as well as the growing practice of the open carry of a handgun.”
Law, whose tweets about Open Carry was quoted by numerous publications, was interviewed by Netherlands Public Radio following her tweet and said to SLJ, “… As you know, Europeans think Americans are crazy to even consider having guns at home or around a child, so they couldn’t imagine why any children’s book would support parents carrying deadly weapons around. Besides watching my Twitter feed explode (every time I went on, I had hundreds of notifications), friends kept telling me about pieces in The Guardian, Huffington Post UK, and lots of others—including one of my favorites, conservativeinfidel.com.”
However, she also says:
“While I personally am an advocate for much stricter handgun laws and would never own a gun, I believe the authors of My Parents Open Carry wrote a book that argued their position responsibly—it’s just that many of us find that position rather terrifying. In the book, the parents keep their guns locked in a safe when they’re not ‘open carrying’ them, and they talk to others about why they believe in handguns without mocking the people who argue with them. (Unlike, I hasten to add, much of the Twitterverse, which sent me hateful tweets calling me a bigot, against the constitution, prejudiced, leftist [bleep], etc.”
The book’s open carry message wasn’t the only point of ridicule. In his August 5 segment, Colbert poked fun of the book’s stiff writing style and awkward illustrations:
“As a picture book… the book is a total disaster,” says Law to SLJ. “Leaving politics completely out of it, you could use the book at a writer’s conference as an example of something that makes every classic mistake in the field.”
Perhaps the authors weren’t aiming for artful writing and illustrations. Perhaps they were aiming to fill a niche—as well as deliver a pedagogical message to children. One thing for certain—should the authors ever wish to write a sequel, they only need to look to the Twittersphere that abounded with ideas, both humorous and bordering on tasteless, for its title.
Some being: : “Heather Has Two Glocks”; “It’s Okay, He Was Wearing a Hoodie”; and “‘Open Carry’ isn’t a verb. And I’ll stand my ground and shoot in the face anyone who pretends it is.”
Watch a clip of “The Colbert Show” segment that aired August 1 here: