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NRA Makes a Gun Cartoon for the Kids

Gun Safety 101

The NRA wants you to think of the children—after marketing guns to them.

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NRA

Finally, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is embracing common sense and compassion. They’re supporting real regulations to keep people safe! And…you can’t possibly have bought that unless you’ve been in a persistent vegetative state since about 1982.

No, what the three-lettered, gun-clutching He-Men are actually doing is more of what they do best: They’re now using a cartoon to appeal to the clearly underserved teenage-and-under market for the Bushmaster Carbon-15.

Think of it as a Joe Camel for the modern age. With armor-piercing bullets.

Ostensibly, it’s part of their “Eddie The Eagle program,” which instructs kids to run away from guns left lying around because bigger people in their lives still can own a firearm. And own them they do, as well as enjoying the freedom (!) to leave them pretty much any damn place they please. And because of the NRA’s efforts in parts of the South, West, and Midwest, these edified souls can now leave them in more places where a little one can find them—because nursery schools, parks, libraries, airports, and churches just didn’t have the same loving feeling without the guns.

So after creating the situation that puts over 650 in a hospital per annum and killed 62 kids a year from 2007 to 2011, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control (do you see why the NRA suppressed funding for gun studies for so long? For the NRA, statistics are bad), what to do to stop it?

First, they created Eddie The Eagle, who I guess is supposed to be like Smokey Bear, Old Glory, and one of the few animals not yet shot by Ted Nugent all wrapped into one. But now they have him in animated form, where he and his friends sing, dance, play video games, use the phrases the kids use (“like a true fashionista, heyyyy!”) and forget to run away from a gun, but promise the next time they see one, they’ll boogie on out of the room posthaste.

Which they won’t because—as a piece on ABC News recently detailed—even after being instructed not to touch a gun, kids (who didn’t know they were on camera) will go right for them anyway:

More than 50 teenagers participated in the same PrimeTime experiment and many, including those who had recently received warnings to stay away from guns, responded similarly, agonizing over whether to tell an adult, playing with the gun, and aiming it at one another.

Even warning and educating kids about the danger of guns can have absolutely no effect on their behavior, the ABC News investigation shows. One teenager whose friend was recently killed in a shooting didn’t even hesitate before grabbing a gun.

But hey, in the video—in an effort to show how serious he is about preventing this kind of a tragedy from occurring—Eddie’s friend Officer Wingman tells the kids in quick succession: “You guys made the right decision. It’s always the best choice to get away from a gun. Who wants pizza?”

That ought to do it, at least to the birdbrains running the NRA. Or perhaps not, but really, who cares? Because, hey, they “tried.”

A young girl in Arizona guns down an instructor on a gun range by mistake, because she’s shooting a weapon way too big for her small body. No biggie. A 5-year-old shoots his baby brother in the head. No problem.

Maybe we can get Eddie The Eagle to tell NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre not to give a shit whether kids die every day from the unregulated, lethal product he pushes at a rate astronomically higher than other similar countries’ who have passed common sense laws to stop it. Knowing Eddie’s record, if Mr. Eagle wants LaPierre to ignore all the kids suffering unnecessarily, maybe for the first time he’ll actually care.

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