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Eddie Eagle

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This article is about the NRA's safety program. For the British ski-jumper, see Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards. For the film, see Eddie the Eagle (film).

The Eddie Eagle GunSafe program and its namesake character were developed by the National Rifle Association for children who are generally considered too young to be allowed to handle firearms. While maturity levels vary, the Eddie Eagle program is intended for children of any age from pre-school through third grade. The NRA encourages parents and other adults to reach out to schools and inform them of the availability of the program.[1] The NRA provides all the classroom materials at no cost for schools who take advantage of the training.[citation needed] The program has been criticized as ineffective.

Training program

The program is administered in schools by trained law enforcement officers with the help of a volunteer. The program seeks to train children to avoid causing harm when they encounter firearms, through a litany: "Stop! Don't touch! Leave the area! Tell an adult!"

  • Stop — This first step is crucial. Stopping first allows your child the time he or she needs to remember the rest of the safety instructions
  • Don't touch — A firearm that is not touched or disturbed is unlikely to fire and otherwise endanger your child or other people.
  • Leave the area — This removes the temptation to touch the firearm as well as the danger that another person may negligently cause it to fire.
  • Tell an adult — Children should seek a trustworthy adult, neighbor, relative or teacher – if a parent or guardian is not available.[2]

The curriculum includes workbooks and a short video, featuring Jason Priestly,[3] that reinforce the instructions. Instructional materials can be downloaded at no cost via the Eddie Eagle webpage.

Eddie Eagle mascot costumes cost $2800 in 2015.[4]

Origins and impact

NRA board member and soon-to-be president Marion Hammer developed this program in 1988.[3] According to the NRA, "with a firearm present in about half of all American households, young children should learn that firearms are not toys."[5] Hammer won a National Safety Council's Outstanding Community Service Award in 1993 for her work on the program.[6]

As of 1997, the NRA says it reached 10 million children,[3] and by 2015 it said that the number had grown to 28 million.[4] The program has been mandated for schools in North Carolina and Oregon, and is used in individual school districts across the country.[3][7]

In 2015, the program was revamped by Tulsa, Oklahoma, advertising agency Ackerman McQueen.[8] The agency has won several local ADDY Awards for the its work on the campaign.[9]

Effectiveness

In 1999 the ABC News program 20/20 did a feature on Eddie Eagle which was highly critical of the program.[10] This feature stated that it did not work to simply "Tell [very young] kids what to do" and expect them to follow those instructions implicitly. The producers had a group of schoolchildren (aged 3 to 10 years old) watch the Eddie Eagle video along with a presentation by a police officer on gun safety. While the children all appeared to understand the message that guns are not toys, when the children were left alone with prop guns (and a hidden camera capturing their reactions), they all proceeded to use them as if they were toys.

A 2002 study by Marjorie S. Hardy published in the journal The Future of Children in a special issue on the topic of "Children, Youth, and Gun Violence", identified the Eddie Eagle program as "perhaps the most popular" gun avoidance program for prekindergarten through the sixth grade but said the program "does not give children a reason for avoiding guns (such as that guns are dangerous)" and that "The NRA offers no empirical evidence that its approach is effective.".[11] This study was recreated and featured in a 2014 20/20 feature.[12]

Two 2004 studies published in Pediatrics, found that the Eddie Eagle program was ineffective at teaching children gun safety skills. Himle et al. studied a sample of preschool-aged children (ages 4 and 5) and Gatheridge et al. studied a sample of children ages 6 and 7. In both studies, children with and without participating in the program were presented with simulated gun access situations. In both studies, the Eddie Eagle program was found to be effective in teaching children to verbalize the gun safety messages, but none of the children who participated in the Eddie Eagle program were able to perform the safety behaviors in the simulated situations.[13][14]

The NRA reports several examples of program successes in which children who were in live situations where a gun was found lying around did exactly as the program instructed them to.[15] They say that a significant decline in accidental gun deaths dating from the 1980s is due to the program, a claim that is contested by safety experts.[16]

Media coverage

Samantha Bee on her show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, in a segment accusing the NRA of hypocrisy, contrasted an unsuccessful attempt to acquire an Eddie Eagle costume, noting an 18 page application and 20 day review period, while successfully purchasing several firearms without a background check.[17][18][19] In response to the segment the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action noted that the Eddie Eagle mascot is trademarked, to be used "ONLY for the purpose of firearm accident prevention" and subject to private property rights vs. 2nd Amendment rights.[20]

Criticism

Some parents have objected to the program because it assumes there will be guns lying around and makes people comfortable with guns, or because it contradicts their own teachings.[7][21]

Advocates of safe storage laws intended to protect children from unsupervised access to firearms, such as the proposed "MaKayla's Law" in Tennessee, complain that the NRA opposes their efforts and promotes Eddie Eagle instead.[22] An early childhood education specialist who helped create the Eddie Eagle program, denies that it is a replacement for safe storage laws. "No one ever told me that's how the program was going to be used," she says. "If they had, I assure you I wouldn't have had anything to do with it. That's giving way too much significance to the lesson."[22]

The Economist says that the program treats children as the problem rather than guns. It says the NRA sends a mixed message, noting that the organization encourages gun use by children as young as seven or eight years old in its magazine InSights.[5]

The American Academy of Pediatrics, in periodic policy statements entitled "Firearm Injuries Affecting the Pediatric Population", discouraged the use of the Eddie Eagle program, among other recommendations.[23]

In 1992 the Academy recommended:

Because gun education programs are widely available and heavily promoted, the Academy cautions educators to choose educational programs and approaches carefully, avoiding those that might inadvertently encourage or promote the access of firearms to children. Gun safety education programs directed at children should be evaluated prior to widespread impbementation.[24]

In 2000 the Academy recommended:

...the absence of guns from children's homes and communities is the most reliable and effective measure to prevent firearm-related injuries in children and adolescents...For developmental reasons, educational interventions are unlikely to be effective for many children and adolescents.[25]

In 2012 the Academy wrote:

Gun avoidance programs are designed to educate children as a way of reducing firearm injury (e. g., Eddie Eagle, STAR); however, several evaluation studies have demonstrated that such programs do not prevent risk behaviors and may even increase gun handling among children.[26]

On April 11, 1998, The New York Times editorialized "...the N.R.A. is using this educational program to fight restrictions on gun access that would actually prevent youngsters from killing themselves and others. The organization has promoted the use of the feathery cartoon character Eddie in classrooms as an alternative to laws that would mandate trigger locks or require adults to keep guns stored in places reasonably inaccessible to children."[27]

The gun control advocacy organizations Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Violence Policy Center are critical of the program and its efficacy.[28][29]

References

  1. ^ "Eddie Eagle School Gun Safety Program".
  2. ^ "NRA Explore - Eddie Eagle". 2015-05-22. Archived from the original on 2015-05-22.
  3. ^ a b c d Bendavid, Naftali (November 20, 1997). "NRA Safety Cartoon Attacked: Gun-control Report Calls Eddie Eagle A Bird Of Prey". Chicago Tribune.
  4. ^ a b Bailey, Henry (June 27, 2015). "Eddie Eagle eager to keep kids safe from guns". The Commercial Appeal.
  5. ^ a b "Youth & age: Playing with fire". The Economist. December 23, 2000. pp. 37–39.
  6. ^ Johnson, Carrie (March 15, 2005). "Famed, decried for work on guns". St. Petersburg Times.
  7. ^ a b "Oregon picks NRA to teach children about gun safety". Amarillo Globe-News. June 18, 1999. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help)
  8. ^ Spies, Mike (October 13, 2016). "The NRA may be misusing its child gun-safety program". Business Insider.
  9. ^ "26TH ADDY AWARDS". Tulsa World. January 31, 1993.
  10. ^ "20/20 Show on Gun Safety". ABC News. Retrieved 2012-03-16.
  11. ^ Hardy, Marjorie S. (2002). "Behavior-Oriented Approaches to Reducing Youth Gun Violence". The Future of Children. 12 (2).
  12. ^ Sawyer, Diane (January 31, 2014). "What Young Kids Do With Guns When Parents Aren't Around". ABC News. Retrieved December 7, 2016.
  13. ^ Himle, MB; Miltenberger, RG; Gatheridge, BJ; Flessner, CA (January 2004). "An evaluation of two procedures for training skills to prevent gun play in children". Pediatrics. 113 (1 Pt 1): 70–7. doi:10.1542/peds.113.1.70. PMID 14702451.
  14. ^ Gatheridge, BJ; Miltenberger, RG; Huneke, DF; Satterlund, MJ; Mattern, AR; Johnson, BM; Flessner, CA (September 2004). "Comparison of two programs to teach firearm injury prevention skills to 6- and 7-year-old children". Pediatrics. 114 (3): e294-9. doi:10.1542/peds.2003-0635-L. PMID 15342889.
  15. ^ "NRA Victories: Eighteen Million Safer Kids". National Rifle Association of America, Institute for Legislative Action. July 27, 2006. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  16. ^ Luo, Michael; McINTIRE, MIKE (September 29, 2013). "Children and Guns: The Hidden Toll". New York Times.
  17. ^ Blistein, Jon (2016-04-12). "Samantha Bee Slams NRA Regulations in Pursuit of Gun Safety Mascot". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2016-09-13.
  18. ^ Cooke, Charles (2016-04-12). "Vox and Samantha Bee Ignore Markets in Favor of Gun Propaganda". National Review. Retrieved 2016-09-13. "Eddie the Eagle" is a private, trademarked, fictional character owned by an organization that is able to restrict his replication as much as it wishes. Firearms, by contrast, are constitutionally protected goods that cannot be denied to free people without good cause. Of course it is easier to get hold of one than the other. To buy a gun one needs to be of a certain age and to be without a criminal record; to obtain an "Eddie the Eagle" costume one needs to meet whatever conditions the character's owners have imposed.
  19. ^ Wagner, Meg (April 12, 2016). "Samantha Bee proves it's easier to buy a gun than an NRA Eddie Eagle mascot costume". New York Daily News. The National Rifle Association has made it nearly impossible to purchase a likeness of its gun safety mascot, Eddie Eagle, while fighting to make it easier for Americans to get their hands on deadly weapons... Bee started by filling out an 18-page costume application, a thorough document outlining the rules for all would-be Eddie Eagle portrayers. ... But when she learned it would take 20 days to process the application, Bee looked for a birdy copy online.
  20. ^ "Samantha Bee's "Epic Takedown"? More Like "Epic Fail"". NRA-ILA. National Rifle Association. April 15, 2016. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
  21. ^ Ghessie, Amanda (November 2016). "Mom Who Taught Son 'All Guns Are Bad' Outraged By NRA Vid That Undoes '7 Years of Parenting'". Independent Journal Review.
  22. ^ a b Spies, Mike (October 21, 2016). "When Kids Pull the Trigger, Who is Responsible? Not Gun Owners, the NRA Says". Newsweek.
  23. ^ Brody, Jane E. (August 17, 2004). "Keeping Guns Out of Children's Hands". The New York Times. Retrieved December 7, 2016. Since 1988, the National Rifle Association, in part hoping to avert more stringent gun control laws, has underwritten a child-based approach called the Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program that uses various age-appropriate activities to teach children safe ways to behave when they encounter a gun. Its basic tenets are: Stop. Don't touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult. Since its introduction, the N.R.A. program has been presented to about 15 million children nationwide and is currently used to teach firearm injury prevention to 700,000 children each year, said Michael B. Himle, Dr. Raymond G. Miltenberger and fellow psychologists at North Dakota State University. But as they noted in the January issue of Pediatrics, developers of the N.R.A. program offer little evidence concerning its effectiveness. As a result, the American Academy of Pediatrics is discouraging its use until its value can be documented. The North Dakota psychologists compared the N.R.A. program with one they devised that taught 4- and 5-year-old children behavioral skills to prevent firearm injuries. Although the children were able to repeat the lessons in supervised role playing after the sessions, "learning these skills is of limited value if the child does not use them in real-life situations," the team wrote.
  24. ^ "Firearm Injuries Affecting the Pediatric Population" (PDF). Pediatrics. 89 (4). American Academy of Pediatrics: 788–790. 1992. ISSN 0031-4005.
  25. ^ "Firearm Injuries Affecting the Pediatric Population". Pediatrics. 105 (4). American Academy of Pediatrics: 888–895. April 2000. ISSN 0031-4005.
  26. ^ "Firearm-Related Injuries Affecting the Pediatric Population". Pediatrics. 130 (5). American Academy of Pediatrics. November 2012.
  27. ^ "Don't Shoot. Run for Mommy". The New York Times. April 11, 1998. p. 10.
  28. ^ Helmke, Paul (May 11, 2010). "NRA's "Eddie Eagle" Doesn't Fly or Protect". The Huffington Post. Retrieved December 7, 2016.
  29. ^ Glick, Susan; Sugarmann, Josh (November 19, 1997). Joe Camel with Feathers: How the NRA with Gun and Tobacco Industry Dollars Uses its Eddie Eagle Program to Market Guns to Kids. Violence Policy Center. ISBN 9780927291163. Retrieved December 7, 2016.
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