In the face of the research findings, the gun group {NRA} has spent years discrediting child access prevention laws and pushing the Eddie Eagle program in their stead.
The gun group has claimed that deaths from unintentional shootings are at a record low, making safe storage laws unnecessary. Experts estimate that roughly 110 children died in unintentional shootings from 2005 to 2012. By international standards, that’s a staggering rate: American children younger than 15 are nine times more likely to die by gun accident than children in other developed countries.
Miltenberger and his colleagues tested the Eddie Eagle program on four- and five-year-olds and six- and seven-year-olds. In both studies, they divided the children into three groups: a control group, which received no gun safety training; a group taught with the Eddie Eagle program; and a final group which received behavioral skills training, or BST, a method that when applied to firearms emphasizes repeated rehearsal of gun-discovery situations coupled with praise and corrective feedback.
The results show that children with BST training were the most likely to avoid touching firearms, while those with no training fared the worst. The group of children who had received five sessions of Eddie Eagle scored slightly better than those without, but still fared poorly at gun safety.
The children’s behavior grew even riskier in the in situ tests placing them alone with a firearm. Among the four- to five-year-olds in the study, only one of the 11 children was able to apply the lessons of Eddie Eagle. Similarly, in the second study of six- to seven-year-olds, only two of 15 steered clear of the unsecured gun.
Miltenberg also believes that gun safety protocols should not place the onus on children to make the right decisions. A better system makes adults responsible for keeping firearms out of young hands. Skills training will never be 100 percent reliable, he notes — the safest option is always to store firearms, unloaded, in a locked gun cabinet.
http://www.thetrace.org/2016/04/nra-eddie-eagle-child-gun-safety-program-ineffective/
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