The straight-shooting and down-to-earth Atticus Finch is
rarely misunderstood, nor does he ever deliberately mislead anyone in To Kill
a Mockingbird. The children do eventually discover their father's true
disdain for guns; when Atticus refused to teach them how to shoot their air rifles
(instead allowing brother Jack to instruct them), Jem and Scout assume that it is
because Atticus does not know how to shoot. They discover the real truth, of course,
when they learn of their father's old nickname after his killing of the mad
dog.
Atticus may or may not have deliberately misled the
children when he told them that the "Ku Klux's gone," referring to the KKK. The Ku Klux
Klan surely had not disappeared, though there may have been little to no activity around
Maycomb. Although the lynch mob that showed up at the jail to take Tom is never
identified directly as KKK members, it does raise the question of whether Atticus was
naive concerning the organization, or whether he was simply trying to soothe his
family's worries about the situation.
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