Tuesday, Dec. 14 marks the ninth anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, where a 20-year-old man shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children ages 6 and 7.
Kansas dodged a bullet in May: There won’t be a law requiring public school students under the age of 12 to submit to NRA indoctrination. House Bill 2089, passed by the legislature but vetoed by the governor, would have accomplished just that, codifying the NRA Eddie Eagle GunSafe accident prevention program into Kansas’ elementary school curriculum.
I grew up in rural America, the cradle of this county’s gun culture. If not a chicken in every pot, at least a rifle in every house. On the first day of pheasant season, so many of my classmates would be absent it felt like a national holiday. Sometimes my father would let young men, farm boys back from Vietnam, hunt in our wintering fields. They’d return with rabbits, field-dressed and peppered with buckshot, which my mother soaked and cleaned in a sink filled with saltwater.
My father taught all of his daughters how to shoot with the Luger he’d brought back from his own war, the one he seldom spoke of. He kept several pistols in his closet inside a metal box — next to his 95th Infantry patch, a Silver Star, two Purple Hearts and the pins with rifles and laurels. I only learned years later these are Combat Infantryman badges. My sisters and I never touched that box, just as we never touched the shotgun that stood next to it.
I have nothing against guns.
What I do have a problem with is legislation that would allow the nation’s most powerful and polarizing gun lobby to inculcate grade school students with their brand under the guise of gun safety education.
Make no mistake, Eddie Eagle is a marketing tool. It was NRA lobbyist, executive and uber-influencer Marion Hammer who cooked up the Eddie Eagle concept in 1988.
“I pledge to you to dedicate my term in office to two demanding missions. One is building an NRA bridge to America’s youth,” she later said at an NRA convention. “The other is being fiscally far-sighted to provide for bold new programs that will teach America’s children values to last a lifetime. It will be an old-fashioned wrestling match for the hearts and minds of our children.”
Eddie Eagle has often been compared to the tobacco industry’s Joe Camel. In many ways the Eddie Eagle campaign seems to be modeled on doing exactly what the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement prohibits, that is, targeting young people.
Use of cartoons? Cartoon eagle. Check.
Celebrity endorsements? Hire Hollywood 90210 actor to do Eddie Eagle video. Check.
Merchandising to children? Print up Eddie stickers with a big “©NRA”. Check.
Ackerman McQueen, the ad agency that handled all of the NRA’s marketing, media (NRATV) and public relations for nearly four decades — until the marriage hit the rocks in 2019 — tweaked Eddie Eagle over the years. The agency eventually solicited the assistance of a University of Oklahoma education professor to give some credence to the campaign. The cartoons progressed from the dorky, racially insensitive Jason Priestley version to the current one, featuring a blue-eyed eagle with his team of stereotypes masquerading as diversity.
Strip away the basketball shtick, pizza party with a gun-friendly authority figure, the slapstick of Gary the game-geek Goose, a hyperactive hummingbird and frat-boy interpretations of ethnicity and, frankly, there’s not much left. The academic later recanted her support.
The entire Eddie Eagle “curriculum” seems to be devoid of substantive educational merit. Compared to the McGruff the Crime Dog firearm safety education program — which also uses the catchphrase, “Stop. Don’t Touch. Get away. Tell an adult.” — Eddie Eagle is dumbed-down, dated and redundant.
The handouts consist of three vapid packets for children ages 4 through 10, padded with the same hackneyed coloring pages. The instructor guides include recommendations like: reinforce the alphabet, show an understanding of grammar and language or have students draw the cartoon characters. Move over, Baby Einstein.
The McGruff material, created in partnership with the National Shooting Sports Foundation, actually sounds like it was written by educators who understand instructional concepts, and the activity pages show the same level of competency.
Moreover, the Eddie Eagle materials steer adults to eddieeagle.nra.org for more information, including tabs for NRA memberships and donations. The NRA website is where police departments must go to buy the Eddie Eagle mascot costume (for a mere $2,800) or apply for grants from the Friends of the NRA.
The clunky kid’s website is little more than an afterthought: with its tiny icons, poor typography and oddly truncated stories, it feels as if the marketing team finally stopped pretending they cared about children.
The Eddie Eagle GunSafe program, under closer scrutiny, is little more than bad advertising. Unfortunately, these days the very word “gun” has become the chosen battle cry of Second Amendment profiteers intent on escalating conflict.
I miss men like my father who knew, first hand, the pleasure of a weapon and the ugliness of a war.
C. Malcolm Ellsworth is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Kansas Reflector and elsewhere. Ellsworth lives in Eudora, Kansas.
How very strange to get this issue completely upside down.
Eddie Eagle teaches young children to AVOID guns. Anyone who knows anything about the program can see this.
Repeating the talking points of the gun-ban lobby doesn’t change the fact that the Eddie Eagle program works with local law enforcement to teach young children who find a gun to: “1. STOP!, 2. DON’T TOUCH! 3. LEAVE THE AREA! 4. TELL AN ADULT!”
How in the world can anyone conjure up the notion that this is a marketing program for getting kids to like guns?
“How in the world can anyone conjure up the notion that this is a marketing program for getting kids to like guns?
Promoting gun sales is the NRA’s charter and their primary source of income, but hundreds of dead children have become problematic for their marketing message.
If the intent is to protect children, the message should be:
“If you have children living in or visiting your home, never have a gun in the house.”
Short. Simple. Effective.
It should not be left to children to learn to “avoid” the guns around them.
The adults are the ones lacking in discipline here.
Of course all organizations that teach real gun safety have taught for decades to not leave loaded guns unattended. Yes, including the NRA.
As for it being in the NRA charter that it promotes gun sales, I’d love to a copy of this imaginary document. Utter nonsense.
Only the firearm makers have given away millions of gun safety locks. No gun control group has ever taught a gun safety class or distributed millions of gun locks.
Your hatred of gun owners may define you, but it doesn’t grant a license to make up falsehoods.
I had to call it something, so I said charter. It doesn’t invalidate what I wrote,
and I stand by it. Here’s a simple test: Does the NRA want more guns sold or less?
Millions of gun safety locks. For millions of guns. Millions. Like that’s a good thing.
You don’t even see it. You just want more. Here’s a word: addiction.