I love, love National Public Radio. It boasts one of the biggest, best news gathering organizations in the world, reporting without fear or favor from across the globe. By listening, I can be sure of being on top of the most important stories of the day. If it weren’t for NPR, I wouldn’t be able to share with you this great breaking news:

The NRA is rewriting fairy tales to make them gun-friendly. Yes, Grandma – and Red Riding Hood herself – will be carrying! That big, bad wolf had better slink back into his lair now, while he still has a chance to get away with his hide intact.

Now, to be nit-pickingly correct, I did not get this info from NPR’s crack news team but rather from the hilariously irreverent Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the NPR “news quiz” that brightens Saturday morning in this and a lot of other homes, but still . . . the NRA is putting an ammo gloss on classic kiddies’ tales.

I really thought the once-respected National Rifle Association had truly hit the zenith of idiocy in 2013, when it compiled – seriously – an enemies list and posted it on its website. Representing the height of nincompoopery, it contained well over 500 names, from the AARP to Reese Witherspoon, and swept up such notorious souls as Britney Spears, Debbie Reynolds and Arlene Dahl (still with us, at 90, today) as well as living lefties like George Clooney and Rob Reiner and the even then quite dead Ed Koch and Andy Williams.

It listed corporate malefactors as well – including (in 2013!) Blue Chip stamps and McCall’s magazine (in 2013?). And Sara Lee! Somebody didn’t like Sara Lee?

My favorite enemy was Mallinckrodt Inc., a St. Louis clothing starch company.

How on earth can a clothing starch company be a threat to guns?

I was not the only one who apparently found the enemies’ list a hilarious reminder of what truculent bullies and boobs those who run the NRA are, and – within a week of truly overwhelming ridicule – it quietly disappeared from the website.

And now the NRA is giving us the Grimm Brothers with guns. So far it has posted two stories on the NRA Family site – the NRA has a family site! – and I trust there will be more to come. “Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun)” went up in January, and “Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns)” was posted a few weeks ago.

The interesting twist in the NRA’s “reimagined” fairy tales is that the Grimm Brothers’ stories already are exceedingly . . . well, grim, abounding with violence and bloodshed. Which, as I recall, is why a lot of children, who often relish buckets of gore, like them so much.

The NRA is striving to show how much safer the children are with guns.

In the traditional Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf eats Grandma, dons Grandma’s night dress and cap, then gobbles up Red Riding Hood, who had dropped in with a basket of goodies. Eventually a wandering woodsman comes along and chops up the wolf. And voila! Blood and wolf parts are everywhere, and Grandma and Red pop out, unscathed.

The reimagined story has tough, confident Red striding through the woods swinging her omnipresent rifle, foiling the lurking wolf. So the wolf hightails it to Grandma’s house and advances on the sweet old lady, intent on chomping on her, when he hears – click! – the unlocking of the safety on Grandma’s shotgun. Before the wolf has a chance to slink away, Red and her rifle arrive, and the two capable ladies proceed to tie the critter up to wait for a hunter to mosey by. Said hunter takes the wolf off to a no doubt grisly off-stage end, and Gram and Red have tea and cookies.

Hansel and Gretel is typically Grimm as well, involving an evil stepmother (of course!), two children deliberately left in the woods to starve and a cannibalistic old witch who captures them so she can roast and eat them, although they do cleverly manage to outwit the witch, shove her into her own oven and roast her, and escape with her treasure.

In the NRA retelling, Hansel and Gretel are resourceful young hunters bearing guns who have just killed a deer for their family’s dinner when they happen upon the witch’s cottage, rescue two other children she’s holding and escape, only to return to the place accompanied by responsible grown-ups who haul the witch off to jail and to a fair trial before, I assume, executing her. (Of course they’d execute her. She a is witch who eats children!)

I know which versions of the two fairy tales most bloodthirsty real children would prefer to read.

But this is, for the NRA, a relatively benign project, unlike so many of its schemes, so I really don’t think it should be dissuaded from continuing with it. And others think so as well. An NPR report on the project contained several tweets inspired by the rewritten fairy tales.

“Prince traveling kingdom 2 find owner of glass slipper shot dead by gun wielding evil stepmother,” said one enthusiast, proposing an alternative offering for Cinderella.

Another offered his version of the Goldilocks and Three Bears story: “The porridge was too cold, the bed was too hard, but this AK47 is just right. Who’s up for some bearskin rugs?”

Good stuff, but why confine the NRA project to fairy tales? What about “Goodnight, room. Goodnight, moon. Goodnight, Glock.” Or Cinderella, being a thoroughly 21st-century girl, blasts away those nasty stepsisters with a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle.

And how about a Harry Potter remake? Why should the boy with the scar mess with magic when a .38 special will take care of Voldemort for good?

I do wonder how long the enthusiasm for the NRA family togetherness project will last.

Back in the day, a Catholic priest, Father Peyton, founded the Family Rosary Crusade, which encouraged families to have daily group rosary prayers. During the Cold War the CIA – you read that right, our spooky spy organization – helped to promote it as (I am not kidding) a key part of the national crusade against godless Communism.

Its slogan was “the family that prays together stays together,” and my mother bought into the thing briefly. So every evening she would gather the family in the living room to kneel and pray the rosary together. Our participation was short-lived because within days our dog, Ginger, decided to join us. She’d plant herself in the middle of the room, throw back her head and howl mournfully.

That was the wonderful end of our enthusiasm for group prayer.

And I suspect that the enthusiasm of NRA families for the revamped fairy tales may well be as fleeting as our family’s zeal for a family rosary session. After all, the chopped-up wolves and roasted witches of the grisly originals are so much more fun!

(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)