DON'T SHOOT EDDIE EAGLE FOR TEACHING KIDS ABOUT GUN SAFETY

I guess I've been so busy thinking about Elian that I almost missed another outrage in progress. But this time the outrage was not being committed by the gun-happy executive branch, but by its liberal enablers who believe the Clinton gestapo ought to have a monopoly on guns.

The Eddie Eagle Gun Safety Program was designed by the National Rifle Association to teach young children to stay away from guns. Primarily through use of a video, it teaches children how to avoid gun-related accidents. The video shows a group of children finding a gun in an attic when Eddie Eagle, a cartoon character, swoops down and, without touching the gun, delivers a four-part safety instruction: "Stop. Don't Touch. Leave the Area. Tell an Adult."

The proponents of the video boast of its success. The NRA emphasizes that its purpose is not to teach whether guns are good or bad, merely to promote gun safety. Eddie never encourages the use or ownership of firearms.

Well, you guessed it. Despite the innocuousness of the program, gun-control zealots have stormed out of the woodwork to scream bloody murder (literally). In reaction to a New York City police officer showing schoolchildren the Eddie Eagle video, city public advocate Mark Green erupted, "I think the NRA has blood on its hands. I think they are morally and legally responsible for thousands of deaths a year, in a sense, in our city and our country, and they should not be anywhere near our kids talking about guns."

Would you agree that these are hysterical rantings? Regardless of how many deaths occur from firearms each year, how is the NRA remotely responsible for those deaths? Even if you accept the notion that it encourages private gun ownership, such ownership doesn't account for thousands of deaths each year, unless you consider ownership by criminals. Let's look at the stats:

Anti-gun fanatics tell us that from 13 to 17 children are killed by guns every day in the United States. They intend to create the false impression that these are all innocent little children killed accidentally. In the April 17 issue of National Review, Dave Koppel reports that the number of fatal gun accidents in this country is at its lowest level since 1903. Is that not astonishing, based on the propaganda we are fed to the contrary?

Yale Law School research scholar John Lott Jr., a consummate expert in this field, tells us that the actual number of accidental deaths for children, defined as 14 years and under, is 2.6 per day. And for children 10 and under it's 0.4 per day. The only way you get up to 13 children per day is to include kids who are older, mostly 17-, 18- and 19-year-olds, the great majority of whom are killed in gang-related homicides. Need I remind you that gang homicides are not accidental deaths?

Lott also corrects another myth that there is a correlation between gun ownership and murder. "When one studies all countries rather than just a select few as is usually done, there is absolutely no relationship between gun ownership and murder."

Skewed statistics by mouth-foaming gun confiscators also fail to consider the beneficial effects of the defensive use of weapons. Lott tells us that 2.5 million times a year people use guns defensively, including cases where public shootings are stopped before they happen. In other words, private gun ownership saves lives. So if the NRA is indirectly responsible for accidental gun deaths because it promotes gun proliferation (quite a stretch), then by the same logic it is responsible for saving many, many more lives. Or don't those saved lives count to the gun-snatching cultists?

Let me strain to grasp the liberal mindset here. In short, guns are evil, not the criminals who misuse them. Since guns are evil and the NRA promotes innocent-civilian gun ownership, the NRA is also evil. Because the NRA is evil it must be demonized and delegitimized and should not be permitted to be seen in a good light. It's image must not be softened. Since the Eddie Eagle program amounts to the NRA performing noble public service work -- work, that is believed to save children's lives -- it must be censored at all costs.

~David Limbaugh of Cape Girardeau is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.