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?
What does the research say?
In Cleveland and Akron, the Eddie Eagle video is a small part of a much larger program called Safety Town. Safety Town programs differ from district to district, but overall the program is meant to educate kids about safety relating to traffic, fire, strangers, poison and guns.
Carol Mains is executive director of Safety to Go, a nonprofit that provides Safety Town instruction in CMSD schools. She says the gun safety component, including the Eddie Eagle cartoon, was added with a recent grant from MetroHealth.
"It is encouraging when we go see the first graders that they do remember, they remember the song. They tell us what they're supposed to do, you know, so we feel like we’re making a difference.
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.
"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."
The NRA has been criticized by opponents who argue the Eddie Eagle cartoon is the gun group's way of advocating against common-sense gun safety laws.
"The NRA and more broadly, frankly, the gun industry has very intentionally wanted to promote guns as just a good family thing to do," Webster said. "They do not want people to think of it as increasing danger in their home. And they want to frankly get kids interested in shooting sports."
Josh Savani, executive director of NRA general operations, said in a statement that 33 million children have been reached by the Eddie Eagle program since its creation.
“The Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program was developed and designed in coordination with educators, law enforcement officials, and childhood behavioral experts and has been recognized for its effectiveness in preventing accidents with firearms," the NRA wrote. "The Journal of Emergency Nursing previously named the Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program as the best gun accident program it evaluated. The program has also been honored or endorsed by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Association of American Educators. Even the California Department of Justice adopted Eddie Eagle’s lessons for children when developing their guidance on firearms safety for parents. With engaging graphics and songs, the Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program video provides clear, easy instructions to keep kids safe.”
The statement also claimed the number of "child-related firearm accident fatalities" has declined since the Eddie Eagle program's introduction in 1988. CDC data of children's accidental deaths due to guns shows the rate was largely flat since at least 1999, with an uptick in recent years. Webster said it's "laughable" to try to connect the Eddie Eagle program with any decrease in shooting deaths.
"They have no data to show that families whose children were exposed to Eddie the Eagle had any change in the risk of unintentional shooting deaths of children," he said.
Recognizing limitations
In Cleveland, to add heft, the gun safety lesson provided by Safety to Go has an added component – an introduction before the video. At the kindergarten class at Halle, Safety to Go Instructor Eleanor Nurre, a retired teacher, holds up two pictures of guns.
"Point to the picture that's a toy," Nurre said, holding up a picture of a blue gun and a black gun. "All right, put your hands down, you're all wrong; they're both real... a real gun can be any color."
Carol Mains, herself a retired teacher, said she still thinks the Eddie Eagle video is helpful.
"What I like about it is it has a very clear message," she explained. "And of course, it's age appropriate, which is really important."
But she said she recognizes the impact of the gun-safety training is limited because it’s only once per school year, for grades kindergarten through second grade. While funding is limited, she thinks adding more training – and expanding it to older children – will help cement the message.
"We might have to get creative, you know, we might have to train some peers," she said. "We might have to get some volunteers.
Nicholas Scheibelhood, principal at Halle, said he agreed; he thinks the impact could be greater if the lessons are repeated throughout the year and said enlisting CMSD teachers might help.
"Our own students have experienced issues with guns on both sides, being the victim and being the the kid with the gun," he said.
In Akron, the police and fire departments partner with Akron Public Schools to provide Safety Town programming in schools; the Eddie Eagle video is shown in Akron, too.
Nancy Natko, an Akron patrol officer who works on the Safety Town program, says it’s hard to prove if the Eddie Eagle video is helping or not, but:
"There's not very many other programs geared for elementary school kids," she said. "So I think it's a proactive approach on their part (the NRA) to give us guidelines on how to educate kids. It's something that's there. You know, whether you're an advocate of guns or that you're not. The fact is our kids are picking them up."
Natko and Mains in Cleveland both noted before their partnerships with the school districts, Safety Town programming was only held during the summer and only reached a small number of students because of busy parents and issues with transportation.
Natko and Mains also both said they believe gun safety messaging would be more impactful if targeted at teens and pre-teens. Webster, the professor at Johns Hopkins University, said data does point to anti-gun violence messaging being more impactful if it's repeated and targeted at older children, whose brains have developed further.
"I can point to successful interventions, (although) they tend to be fairly intensive," Webster explained. "It's not like, oh, we're going to show up to school one day, talk to the teens about gun violence and call it a day... they take weeks or months rather than a few days. They go beyond, quote unquote, educating, just like, 'okay, here are the facts,' but they're actually try to build social skills."
What else can be done?
There are other approaches available. Michelle Bell is the previous head of gun violence prevention efforts in Ohio for the group Moms Demand Action. In that role, she shared a gun safety program called BeSmart with community members, which focuses on adults' role in keeping guns out of the hands of children and also provides gun safes. The program is offered by Moms Demand Action's parent organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, a national nonprofit that advocates for gun control including safe-storage laws.
"All the material actually is is targeted to the parent to say, 'what are the ways to safely store your gun?'" she explained. "Are you asking those questions when your children are going on playdates or overnight stays, is there a gun in the house?
Bell's activism is personal; she lost her son, Andre Brown, to gun violence in 2019. She started her own advocacy group called M-PAC Cleveland, meant to help others like her.
"Our focus is with survivors of gun violence," she said, "and the goal is to work towards healing. We're promoting peace, hope, healing, and we want to provide activities, events and resources that uplift and inspire healing."
Bell says she thinks gun safety messaging is needed at a larger scale across the U.S., for both children and adults. And she says that’s born out by the stats. In 2023, the CDC reported 22,000 children and teens were shot and killed or wounded by guns in the U.S.
"It's important because guns are here," Bell said. "It's a sad situation because it seems like a lot of times children are targeted. So we want to get some clear good messaging about guns out there."
