The NRA catches a lot of flak from the usual suspects who claim all the organization wants is death and destruction. Never mind that they're the largest source of gun safety education in the world or anything. Oh no, they oppose gun control so that means they just want us shooting anything and everything all of the time.

Yet gun safety is actually a big part of what the NRA does and has always done.

One of those efforts is the Eddie Eagle program which seeks to keep kids safe. While some claim it's indoctrination or something, it's nothing of the sort. Even so, it seems it's under attack out of the blue.

A group of kindergartners sit on the carpet in a classroom at Cleveland’s Halle School and watch a cartoon. In it, Eddie Eagle and his friends discover a gun while playing basketball.

The cartoon characters sing a catchy tune, telling the students what to do if they’re ever in this situation: "Stop, don't touch, run away, tell a grown up."

School districts and communities throughout the country, including in Cleveland and Akron, for years have provided gun-safety lessons to young children as part of broader safety messaging. And the main vehicle for many has been the National Rifle Association-created Eddie Eagle cartoon, originally created in 1988.

But as guns remain the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the cartoon actually effective at preventing children from picking up guns?

Now, the guy who runs a program in Ohio that uses it notes that kids retain the information and sings the songs, which means they're keeping it in mind.

But that's not enough for the writer. In fairness, anecdotal evidence isn't definitive. So, he looked for more input, and got this:

Daniel Webster, a professor of health who studies gun violence prevention at Johns Hopkins University, says several studies have been done on the Eddie Eagle cartoon; although they're all from roughly 20 years ago, he says they all found the video to be ineffective at stopping kids from picking up guns.

One 2004 study from the American Society of Pediatrics, for example, found that the Eddie Eagle program was successful at getting children to repeat the message - to not pick up a gun and tell an adult if they see one - but in actual simulations, children who received the instruction still interacted with (unloaded) guns.

First, I'm going to point out that the American Society of Pediatrics has an anti-gun stance in general. They don't want you owning guns at all, so them not finding a program put out by the NRA as effective isn't shocking.

Plus, let's be real here. No single exposure to much of anything is going to become engrained in a kid in the vast majority of circumstances. Exposing them to the program exactly once and then pretending it's ineffective because it didn't take hold is a bold claim.

If a single exposure to anything was enough, then why do schools keep repeating the same material year after year, only building slightly each year? Because kids don't remember that crap, that's why.

And Webster acknowledges this.

"It takes many more years before they're developmentally capable to control some of those instincts and impulses when you see something like a gun," Webster said.

According to Webster, the safest thing to do is to keep guns away from children in general. A Johns Hopkins University analysis of CDC data found that in 2022, 143 children, from newborns to age 19, died due to unintentional gunshot wounds; 1,238 committed suicide by gun; and 3,111 died due to homicide by gun. Black children and teens had a homicide death rate over 18 times higher than their white peers.

"Children can't be in environments with loaded guns unintended," Webster said. "The education really needs to be directed at the gun owners, the adults, to make sure that if they choose to have firearms that they secure them locked away so that children and adolescents don't get them."

Now, I'm not going to disagree that the onus should mainly be on gun owners. We need to do the right things to keep our kids and others safe.

However, pretending that's enough is nonsense.

First, we've seen way too many cases where kids find guns "in the wild," so to speak, meaning they encounter them outside of the home. They find where someone dumped a gun while running from police or where someone lost their firearm, among a plethora of other scenarios where a gun is somewhere no parent intended for it to be.

We need to teach our kids how to also be responsible enough to not touch a gun and to notify an adult if they find one.

Why is this such a controversial opinion with some people?

No one thinks it's fine to just leave guns lying around in the vast majority of cases. What's more, when you realize how many guns and how many kids there are in this country, the fact that there aren't more of these instances happening shows that most people are doing the right things.

But again, kids can encounter guns all sorts of places, and bulletproofing them--if you'll pardon the pun--is the next logical step.

This idea that we can only do one is asinine.

Then again, look at who they're citing on this.