Comments
Listed in chronological order. Newest comments at the end.

I'm laughing so hard at this one... I still don't think that the US realises how much the rest of the world look at them as a Freak nation on just their stance on guns alone.

Sheeeeesh

Tipper Flintlock needs to be revived to explain the need to own automatic rifles!

Sorry, I'm going to make a very unpopular point here. Well, it's true, and truth is always unpopular.

The NRA offered to pay for a series of cartoon PSAa that would have told kids through a cartoon eagle that if they saw a gun they were never to touch it, but to leave it alone and tell a teacher, police officer or responsible adult where it was.

Now, pause and ask yourselves, particulalry those who live in Australia ( A hunting nation that admittedly prefers to murder people with knives for bushmeat ), or South Africa ( 130% higher gun violence crimes than the USA )does this sound like a pro-gun-use message, considering how clos eit was to the NZ and Australian eductaion plan in schools beofre they simply decide not to mention guns except as something Americans wuse to gain more oil?

Congress described this message as "Repugnant and practically a primer on committing a Columbine tragedy", "No more than Joe Camel with feathers and a machine gun" and "A clear instruction to gun violence".

Did I miss something? Although Congress is the same august body that declared as "Too dangerous and powerful to be put under the control of human beings" the 'so-called internal combustion engine' and also claimed Pearl Hrabour might have been done by the British Royal Navy - "Those masters of propoganda", this seems to be a rather biased view of a very wise safety message.

Perhaps they could update it for today's audience?

Nicky Nine-Mil says:
"Put the gun's safety on
Before you confront the wife,
Or you'll pop a cap in her ass
And face twenty-to-life!"

DFS, I thought your point was interesting... so I fact-checked it. Unfortunately your quotes (at least) seem to be inaccurate, misattributed, or both.

Your post seems to be the only place where any approximation of the 'primer on committing a Columbine tragedy' quote is to be fiound, so colour me dubious on that.

At least one of your other quotes ('Joe Camel with feathers') is misattributed: this comes not from Congress but from the Violence Policy Center, an anti-firearms lobby group. The quote has been attributed to (then?) Sen. Eric Schneiderman on a number of gun lobby sites, but that seems to have no grounding in reality: Schneiderman did campaign against allowing the Eddie the Eagle campaign to be used as the foundation for gun education in state schools, but the quote was not his (Schneiderman's main concern seems to have been about giving a gun-industry-funded pro-gun lobby explicit and officially endorsed access to children in schools, which I for one would see as a legitimate worry).

For what it's worth, you can read the VPC report on Eddie the Eagle (which is actually entitled 'Joe Camel with feathers') here. The report is scarcely unbiased - it's more a polemic than a scientific study, and riddled with the kinds of logically weak claims that tend to dog polemics - but the claim that the NRA developed Eddie the Eagle as both an image-burnishing tool and a way of 'legitimately' targeting kids seems pretty plausible. The report certainly raises legitimate questions about the Eddie the Eagle campaign... even if it fails to satifactorily answer them.

outeast, I would willingly take the blame for any misquotation where I taking this directly, but my qutation was a further quote from somone else . . . and since they were American I assumed they must be right as you people always are ( Joke!).

However, i am going to stand by one thing; The basic message delivered by Eddie in the adverts and I am quoting from memory so forgive me any paraphrasing here or misplaced punctuation, is @ If you see a gun, do not touch it, but go and find an adult and take them to it." Now, I am pretty naive and not good at picking up the subtle nuances of the English language being a foreigner ( As Dumbfounded will attest , But I fail to see any subliminal message there to pick the gun up and use it.

And I HAVE ACTUALLY SEEN the PSA in question; A part of it is in the bumper for a local cable network movie segment on Saturday nights. Considering this country no longer mentions firearms at all in educational terms, when 15% of the population still shoot for food, it seems that perhaps we cannot criticise either.

As for the last paragraph about sinister motivations in images . . . I could tell you some tales about local advertising campaigns with biases and imagery that makes no mistake about their agenda .

DFS,

Cheers for the reply.

I think the controversy is not over the message itself, but over the following issues:

a) Do such campaigns actually work? (The NRA claims they do; the VPC provides some evidence to challenge their claims; I'd chalk it up as 'definitely needs more evidence'.)

b) Does the implementation of such campaigns undermine other measures to reduce the rates of accidental injury/death of children? (Again, unproven either way I think; but if the Eddie the Eagle campaign is being presented as an *alternative* to gun control legislation, for example, then it needs to be very clear that they *do* work. Which is also far from proven.)

c) Could official endorsement of the campaign actually lead to a shift in responsibility from parents to children? (This is a tricky one: the hypothesis seems to be that if the official message is 'kids, don't touch your parents' guns' and not 'parents, keep your guns secure', there could be a shift in the sense of who should be taking responsibility. And kids are NOT responsible, by ansd large. Definitely unproven...)

d) Does the Eddie the Eagle mascot make the NRA (and, by extension, gun culture) 'closer' to children? (The 'Joe Camel' argument; this is the least persuasive and most unproven part of the anti-NRA case, I think, especially since *in a society where guns are near-ubiquitous* there is nothing intrinsically wrong with inculcating a responsible attitude to firearms.)

To my mind, the first two of the above questions are the most important - with the effectiveness of such campaigns being absolutely critical. Before any special-interest lobby such as the NRA should be given a direct and officially sanctioned role in education, the effectiveness of their measures should be very strongly shown. In this case, there is little to suggest that the NRA campaign is effective at all...