The analysis identified how the NRA uses a number of inter-related and synergistic strategies to frame children’s behavioral responses to firearms as the problem (as opposed the widespread accessibility, availability and marketing of firearms and absence of mandatory safety measures) and the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program as the most logical, effective, and legitimate solution to keeping children safe from firearm injuries. Overall, the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program, and the practices used by the NRA to promote its delivery, serve to reproduce industry-favourable framings about gun ownership and safety, to present the NRA as an expert in child safety while portraying their opponents as deceptive and illegitimate, and to dismiss the need for those gun control policies opposed by the firearm industry. Each of these strategies and their functions are discussed further in the following sections and Fig. 1 provides a schematic overview of their inter-related functions.

Fig. 1

Schematic overview of their inter-related functions

Gun ownership, safety and the role of guns in societyFraming children as the problem and the presence of firearms as inevitable and normal

The NRA asserts that is it not the widespread ownership and presence of firearms that should be understood as the problem but children’s behavioral responses should they encounter a firearm unsupervised. This framing of the problem re-enforces the idea that gun ownership is inevitable and desirable, and that it is both normal and unavoidable that children will encounter a firearm in their homes, playgrounds, mother’s handbags and parents’ bedrooms as depicted in the program’s materials (see next section); they just need to know what to do if this happens. The NRA thus rhetorically redefines the problem as arising from children’s behavior around guns, the presence and promotion of which are seen as unproblematic. The NRA also redefines the very concept of safety in a corporate friendly way. From public health and harm prevention perspectives, safety is understood as the creation of safe environments or products through the removal of hazards, and the adoption of safe designs and processes so that harm is unlikely to occur [57]. However, the NRA frames safety in a much more limited way: as something that is achieved by individuals responding to danger in the appropriate way. In this case, it requires children “knowing” what to do and acting upon that knowledge, against their natural childhood instincts and tendencies of curiosity, imitation, and risk-taking, to ensure their own safety. This is most evident in the way the support materials, provided as part of the program, instruct teachers to educate pre-K (also known as pre-Kindergarten or preschool, ages 3–4 years) to 4th grade (ages 9 to 10 years) children about the concept of safety (Table 1) [58,59,60].

Table 1 Lesson instructions on how to teach children about the concept of safety (source pre-K/Kindergarten, 1st/2nd grade and 3rd/4th grade Parent/Instructor Guides) [58,59,60]

The problem is further potentially downplayed and trivialized by means of omission, an important element of framing [61]: in the program materials analyzed there is no acknowledgement that, in the US, firearm injuries are a leading cause of death among children and adolescents, and that it is the presence of firearms in homes and communities that places children at risk of harm [12, 23]. Unlike the materials produced by the AAP, parents, teachers and other professionals are not informed that the most effective way to keep children safe is to have homes and communities free of firearms. Additionally, and consistent with efforts by other industries, such as the automobile industry, to deflect from the avoidably harmful nature of their products and policies governing their sale and use [62], trivializing language like “accident” is predominantly employed in the texts while terms like “violence” and “injuries,” which are adopted by the CDC and AAP, are used rarely.

The role of the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program as a firearm safety interventionFraming the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program as a “lifesaving” solution to child firearm injuries

By establishing children’s behavioral responses to firearms as the problem, the NRA is able to frame the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program as the preferred approach to child safety. The NRA describes the program as “a gun accident prevention program that for over 30 years has helped keep kids safe” [45]. The program’s main element is an eight-minute animation film which is accompanied by additional materials and activities (Table 2). According to the NRA, the program was designed in collaboration with relevant experts to keep children safe by teaching them what to do if they find a firearm:

The program was developed by a task force made up of educators, school administrators, curriculum specialists, urban housing safety officials, clinical psychologists, law enforcement officials and National Rifle Association firearm safety experts. It began in 1988 with one mission: teach children four simple, easy to remember steps so they know what to do if they ever come across a gun [45].

Table 2 Summary of freely available resources provided by each of the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program websites* 

The main film introduces Eddie Eagle, an animated American bald eagle (a symbol of American patriotism and identity), and his “Wing Team,” Fiona Falcon, Howie Hummingbird, Gary Goose, and Maya Guacamaya, who are intended to represent children of different personalities, ethnicities and genders [63]. In the film, Eddie Eagle and his Wing Team unexpectedly find a firearm in the playground where they are playing basketball [64]. The characters emulate what a child in the same situation should do by breaking into song including the program’s main message: “Stop! Don’t touch. Run away. Tell a grown-up”. The group do not touch the firearm, instead leaving the area to alert Eddie’s father and Fiona’s mother. The latter, Fiona explicitly states, will know what to do because she owns a gun and, the program materials tell us, carries this in her handbag [64]. The NRA states that:

Pre-k through fourth grade children [ages 3 to 10 years] will find this video engaging with its catchy songs, dance moves and entertaining dialogue-but most importantly, they’ll know what to do if they ever come across a gun [65].

The NRA frames this approach to firearm safety as being no different to other safety issues that children are taught about:

You talk about stranger danger, internet safety, fire drills and more with children...so why not include gun safety? The program makes no value judgments about firearms, no firearms are ever used, and it covers an important topic that needs to be addressed with kids. Like swimming pools, electrical outlets and lighters, firearms are simply treated as a part of everyday life. With firearms found in about half of all American households, it’s a stance that makes sense [45].

By aligning the issue of keeping children safe from firearm injuries with other issues of safety, the NRA's framing obscures the profound differences between a society choosing to have access to swimming pools and electricity, and the widespread marketing, availability and accessibility of firearms to civilian populations. It also overlooks the suite of other safety policies and measures that are taken to protect children from being harmed by these entities beyond just education, many of which are based on prevention and the removal or modification of hazards so that children are not placed at risk of harm. According to the NRA, the obvious response to the fact that firearms are “part of everyday life” [45] for children, and can be found in approximately half of all households in America, is not to reduce firearm prevalence and thus children’s exposure to the associated dangers, but to place the responsibility on children to manage the threat this poses to their safety. This framing is also highly misleading as it implies that the presence of firearms in American communities is natural, necessary and unavoidable, obscuring the fact that this is not the case in virtually every other high-income country in the world, with associated differences in firearm-related harms, and is the result of conscious political decisions. Given the assumptions made about the positions of guns in American society, the contention that the program does not make “value judgements” [45] about gun ownership appears highly contestable. Furthermore, the reassurance that “no firearms are ever used” [45] is questionable. While it is true that no firearms are discharged, they are still “used” in the sense that they are owned and carried by characters who feature in the program’s materials [49, 64].

The NRA frames their program as “lifesaving” and, at times, attributes downward trends in child firearm injuries in the US to the delivery of its program:

The effectiveness of the program is confirmed by declining gun accidents among children, its popularity with the schoolteachers and law enforcement officers who teach it, and testimonials that relate incidents in which children encountered guns, but because of what they learned in the Eddie Eagle program, they sought help from an adult and avoided potential injuries […] Firearm-related accidents among young children have been on a decline since NRA launched the Eddie Eagle program. It’s a testament to NRA's commitment to child safety and Eddie’s lifesaving message [66].

The NRA has also made statements about the program’s purportedly beneficial impact on children’s knowledge and safety throughout the period from which the data analyzed here is taken (2000 to 2023). Table 3 presents example quotes demonstrating how these statements have been employed over time and through different outlets of the NRA. Framing the program as “lifesaving” relies on an industry-favourable understanding of what counts as evidence of effectiveness. According to the NRA these include the organization “feeling” that the program has had a significant impact as well as anecdotal evidence about the popularity of the program with teachers and officials, or children reciting or acting out the program’s core message. For example, under the FAQs section of the program’s adult-facing website, the NRA states that:

the effectiveness of the Program is evident in several ways. First, fatal firearms accidents in the Eddie Eagle age group have been reduced by more than 80 percent since the program’s nationwide launch, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. NRA feels that gun accident prevention programs such as Eddie Eagle are a significant factor in that decline [47].

Table 3 Examples of statements made and/or disseminated by the NRA about the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program’s impacts

The NRA frames long-term declines in firearm fatalities among children reported by the CDC as evidence of the effectiveness of the program’s message. According to the NRA, such declines are “undoubtedly” in part driven by the delivery of gun-safety programs:

The effectiveness of Eddie’s message is measurable. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that the number of unintentional firearm fatalities among children has declined about 80% since the program’s inception, and gun-safety programs are undoubtedly a major component in that drop [67].

However, no evidence is supplied for such a causal claim, which relies instead on the intuitively appealing but logically fallacious form of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” reasoning. Claims of beneficial impact thus enable the NRA to frame the acceptable and legitimate standards of evidence and proof for establishing what is effective in keeping children safe. The NRA also stresses that beyond such supposed statistical evidence, parent testimonials provide proof of the program's benefit to child safety: "Statistics aside, it’s the volume of testimonials that the NRA receives each year from parents that proves the true value of the Eddie Eagle Program" [68].

Embedding and disseminating the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program

The NRA acts to normalize and embed their program as the legitimate response to child firearm safety issues and promote its dissemination. These practices include influencing the policymaking process and manufacturing public support, as consistent with Ulucanlar et al.’s taxonomy of action strategies [38]. The first of these actions is evident in the way the NRA repeatedly attempts to influence the passage of State-level legislative bills related to gun safety education. These bills essentially stipulate for local school boards to issue standards for firearm safety curricula if a school decides to educate their students on this topic. Some of the bills specifically name the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program as the standard on which to base teaching younger school-aged children about firearm safety. Through the news sections of their America 1st Freedom publication and the NRA-ILA, the NRA provides regular updates on the passage of these bills through State legislators. For example, the NRA provided ongoing coverage of the passage of bill H.B. 791 through the legislative process in Maryland, with one article explicitly acknowledging the organization’s backing of the bill and stating that the bill’s adoption should be seen as a “victory” for the State’s citizens:

In a tremendous victory for the citizens of Maryland, today the House of Delegates passed a bill on second reading that will provide for gun-safety education in all schools. H.B. 791, sponsored by House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. and backed by the National Rifle Association, gives power to the counties when it comes to deciding which gun-safety program to implement [69].

The same article went on to explain that, according to the NRA, the bill’s passage should also be seen as a “victory” over those who support alternative legislation unfavorable to the firearm industry:

Today marks a victory against organizations like Marylanders Against Handgun Abuse, who attempted to hijack this legislation in favor of anti-gun rights programs. H.B. 791 puts gun-safety where it should be, in the hands of the local school boards, not the state. Counties will be able to select the best program for their community and culture to ensure that children are safer than ever around firearms [69].

The coverage of these legislative processes thus facilitated the dissemination of NRA framings about who should be seen as legitimate, credible and trustworthy actors and the role of education programs, like the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program, as a means to “ensure” the safety of children from firearm injuries. Several reports encouraged the reader to act themselves by contacting their local representative to express their support for these bills, with some articles containing a “click here take action” button that facilitated written communication with State Representatives. At times, this form of legislation was explicitly referred to by the NRA as “pro-gun”:

Two bills sprinted through the legislative finish line yesterday as the Senate passed two pro-gun measures which were subsequently approved by the House. Omnibus legislation, House Bill 2058, and Eddie Eagle Gun Safety legislation, House Bill 2089, now head to the desk of Governor Laura Kelly for her signature [70].

Some articles created a sense of urgency if votes or opportunities to overturn a veto were imminent and condemned the actions of those who had voted against such bills. For example, over the period 2021 to 2023 the NRA repeatedly reported on the passage of several bills of this type through the Kansas legislative process all of which failed to be adopted. In the most recent iteration of the events the NRA used their reporting to frame this as a loss to promoting children’s safety and to portray the organization as a partner in prioritizing this agenda:

Unfortunately, this is the second time Governor Kelly has vetoed this important bill, despite its overwhelming bipartisan support in both chambers. Our children's safety should always be a top priority, and the Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program has been doing just that for over 30 years, reaching over 32 million children across the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Please take action now and contact your lawmakers to encourage them to vote for the veto override. Use the link below to take action and make your voice heard. Then, share this alert with your family and friends, and ask them to do the same. Together, we can ensure that our children receive the education they need to stay safe around firearms. [...] Thank you for your support in this critical matter (bolded text in original) [71].

Manufacturing public support for the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program

Beyond eliciting backing for specific forms of State legislation, the NRA acts to manufacture public support for their program by providing positive case studies of the program’s delivery across the US. For example, through the program’s website, the NRA provides a program-specific newsletter, The Eagle Eye, which features articles about educators, law enforcement officers and other actors who deliver the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program in their communities. Similar articles are repeatedly published through the news section of America 1st Freedom and NRA-ILA. The dissemination of these stories, some representing summaries of favourable media reports that provide links to the original source, gives the impression of widespread support for the program and benefits to children’s safety, and buttresses the framing of who is to be seen as a trustworthy actor; those who support the delivery of the program, including industry donors, are framed as collectively taking the logical and commendable approach to keeping children safe from firearms:

Volunteers for the Eddie Eagle program come from diverse backgrounds, but they share a commitment to keeping children safe. Those involved include NRA members, teachers, law enforcement officers, and community activists who teach the program, as well as private donors and Friends of NRA volunteers who raise funds to help pay for the program’s educational materials. More than 26,000 educators, law enforcement agencies, and civic organizations have taught the program since 1988 [72].

One story dedicated to recognizing a law enforcement Captain “for his extraordinary support and dedication in teaching children how to be safe around firearms, using the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® Program” [73] explained that the program had been adopted by the local Sheriff’s Department in response to an incident in a school with the aim of preventing future incidents:

The Sheriff’s Department adopted the Eddie Eagle Program after an incident occurred at an elementary school about a year and a half ago. Since then, the department wanted to introduce the Eddie Eagle Program to other schools to prevent any future incidents. Luckily, the local principals and teachers have welcomed the opportunity to teach gun safety to children with open arms [73].

The program also recruits children to help build public support by encouraging teachers to deliver a letter writing activity. This activity requires children to write a reassuring letter explaining to their parents that they have watched a film about what to do if they find a gun and therefore “know” what to do to keep themselves “safe” in such a situation (Table 4a) [58, 60]. The instructor’s guide advises that:

If you do not choose to complete the group letter writing activity, send home the provided letter (also located in the back of this guide) and encourage students to continue the conversation about gun safety with their families [58, 60].

This second form of the letter (Table 4b) similarly disseminates the framing that exposure to the program’s main film component is effective at ensuring a child will “know” what to do if they find a gun and by implication will act on this knowledge to ensure their own safety [58,59,60].

Table 4 Letter writing activity (a) and letter to parents (b) provided as part of the Eddie Eagle program materials (Source Parent/Instructor Guide Pre-K and Kindergarten https://eddieeagle.nra.org/program-resources/program-materials/)

Dissemination of the program is further facilitated by the NRA who make the program’s film-based and supporting textual materials freely accessible via the two program-specific websites. Funding grants are also available to support the delivery of the program locally. The NRA promotes their grant giving scheme via the program’s website, newsletter, and America 1st Freedom news articles. The program website states that: “Schools, law enforcement, hospitals, day care centers and libraries are eligible for grant funding…Grants are generously made possible by Friends of NRA fundraising events” [47]. Friends of NRA is the fundraising arm of the NRA Foundation which receives funds from major firearm industry actors including, Ruger®, Smith & Wesson, O.F. Mossberg & Sons, Colt®, Sig Sauer, Springfield Armory USA and Savage Arms, among other companies [74]. Notably, many of these companies manufacture high capacity handguns, and in the case of Colt®, Sig Sauer, Springfield, Ruger®, Smith & Wesson, they also produce assault-style semi-automatic rifles. Handguns and assault-style semi-automatic rifles are common causes of firearm-related injury and often used in mass shootings [75]. By publishing accounts of the program’s delivery, as described above, the NRA disseminates the message that these grants are enabling the delivery of their “lifesaving” program:

In an effort to make sure children are kept as safe as possible from accidental shootings, Officer Donnelly applied for a grant sponsored by the National Rifle Association. Through the Eddie Eagle gun safety program, Donnelly's goal was to bring a message to about 450 children in kindergarten through third grades by Oct. 14 [76].

These action strategies enable the NRA to “displace and usurp public health”, a key element of the taxonomy developed by Ulucanlar et al [38]. By promoting their industry-funded education program as a widely supported “lifesaving” prevention intervention, the NRA can present a less effective, industry-favourable, individual-level, education-based measure as the common-sense approach to harm prevention, in place of more effective policy measures unfavorable to the industry. These actions function to reproduce the idea that widespread firearm ownership is normal, inevitable and uncontestable, and that children’s knowledge and behaviors should be the focus of firearm safety interventions. The NRA thus presents itself, and its “generous” industry backers, as acting to protect the safety of children and further burnish their image by association with respected and trusted individuals and institutions, like teachers, schools and law enforcement officers. The organization is then able to tarnish the reputation of those who question the delivery of the program or advocate for firearm policy reform by framing them as duplicitous, undermining of children’s safety, and politically motived, as detailed in the following sections.

The role of the firearm industry and other actors within wider firearms policy debatesFraming the NRA as experts and leaders in child safety

The NRA's framing presents the organization as a disinterested actor which is to be understood as a source of expertise in firearm safety and whose actions help to protect children rather than representing the interests of the firearm industry:

Neither Eddie nor any members of his Wing Team are ever shown touching a firearm, and there is no promotion of firearm ownership or use. The NRA does not make any sort of profit off the program, nor does it intend to. The goal of the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program is to help prevent accidents and keep children safe [45].

In a 2018 article announcing that the program had reached 31 million children since its creation in 1988 the NRA Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre was quoted as saying:

Since our founding, the NRA has been committed to firearm safety, responsibility and education […] Those important concepts are the hallmarks of the Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program. Eddie’s incredible success is proof that proactive accident prevention education works, and works well. Our children are our future, and it’s our responsibility to teach them how to stay safe. To that end, the NRA will continue to work with community leaders to reach youths across our great nation [77].

The article went on to state that “[t]he method has been well-received across the nation, with governors and/or legislative bodies from about half the states proclaiming its merits and recommending the program.” [77]. In another article reporting on an NRA initiative to promote the education program during Halloween, a NRA spokeswomen directly cited the Eddie Eagle program as evidence of their “world” leading efforts to promote firearm safety:

No other organization in the world does more to promote firearm safety than the National Rifle Association […] and the Eddie Eagle Program is a prime example of that [78].

In this way the NRA frames its activities as evidence that they work with trusted and credible actors and organisations to deliver an effective, education-based program that is protecting children and is widely embraced across the country.

However, analysis of the data reveals how the NRA's claim to expertise and impact is contradicted by their use of anecdotes as “proof” of their programs effectiveness in keeping children safe and the approach to the program’s delivery as a safety intervention. The main film is considerably longer than other films used in independently designed and evaluated programs, the program does not include an active behavior skills training component (an approach shown to be more effective than passive learning styles [24]), and the adult-facing materials advise instructors and parents to use as much or as little of the additional materials as they like and no specifications are provided as to how often a child must watch the main film or recite or act out its message in order to stay “safe” around firearms. In contrast, it is well established that safety interventions should be delivered and implemented in accordance with what is known to be effective and deviations from what has been shown to be effective in formal evaluations will affect the impacts of any invention and usually warrant further evaluation.

Most notably, the NRA launched a new version of the program in 2015 with two key changes being the introduction of the Wing Team characters (described above) and a revised core message: “Stop. Don’t Touch. Run Away. Tell A Grown-up.” To justify the change in messaging, the NRA explains that:

Eddie’s original mantra was “Stop! Don’t touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult.” However, during research, the NRA discovered that children had a hard time remembering words they didn’t use regularly—especially area and adult. The updated mantra integrates more kid-friendly words and phrases like run away and grown-up, and recall on the mantra has improved as a result [47].

The NRA also explains what underpins the design of the new film and the Wing Team:

The NRA held 22 focus groups in 12 cities across the country. These groups included superintendents, principals, teachers, parents and children from various ethnicities, genders and socioeconomic backgrounds. Groups reviewed a variety of storylines and characters, which were adapted based on feedback. The NRA is confident that the final product is approachable and relatable for all [47].

However, the NRA does not cite any evidence in support of these statements. Perhaps even more importantly it does not examine the implications of these findings for the claims they make about the program being effective since 1988, nor what these findings imply with regards to its likely inequitable impacts prior to these revisions. Instead, they simply frame these revisions under the reassuring label of “modernization”, and state that the changes are immaterial as their main aim of keeping children safe has not changed. The organization has proceeded to disseminate statements that conceal the substantial changes made to the program even in response to those who question the program’s legitimacy. For example, in an article written in response to a critique of the program by American television host and film producer, Steve Harvey, the NRA countered this by stating that the program had been delivering its life-saving message (citing the second version) since 1988, absent any reference to the revisions to the program and its tagline:

Steve Harvey used an episode of his daytime talk show […] to ridicule the NRA's longstanding gun safety program. He asked, “What’s a better way to keep kids from guns—laws that punish adults who let children get their hands on firearms, or is it Eddie Eagle?” The comedian then went on to mock the mascot and question an NRA claim that the Eddie Eagle GunSafe program has been credited with an 80-percent reduction in child firearm accident fatalities. Harvey should have done a bit more research […] since it began in 1988, the NRA's gun accident prevention program has been widely successful and adopted throughout the nation. To date, it has taught its life-saving message of what to do if children come across a gun— Stop. Don’t Touch. Run Away. Tell A Grown-up—to more than 28 million children in all 50 states, plus Canada and Puerto Rico. So who’s laughing now? [79].

The NRA's framings and the design of the program thus counter decades of public health evidence on the delivery of effective complex interventions and evidence on the drivers of firearm injuries among children. Such practices are clearly contradictory to the claims made by the NRA to be delivering an effective program simply because they claim to be committed to child safety.

Framing the NRA as an apolitical actor

The NRA presents itself as a neutral actor whose apolitical education program “neither offers nor asks for any value judgment concerning firearms” [