Dick and Jane Find a Gun: Critics Quick to Take Aim

Dick and Jane find a gun on a table in their home. “Stop, Jane. Don’t touch the gun,” Dick says. They get their mother. “Mommy, we found a gun,” says Jane. “I am proud of you for telling me so I could put it away,” says Mom.

Oh, Dick. Oh, Jane. Oh, my! Is this the kind of thing children ought to be reading in the classroom?

Yes, says the National Rifle Assn., the powerful gun lobby that packaged that message into an 8-page coloring book for schoolchildren and began distributing it recently to pupils of a private school in a Chicago suburb.

No, say gun control advocates, who have denounced the “My Gun Safety Book” as a public relations gimmick by a controversial group that has led an unrelenting assault on the nation’s gun laws.

“If you read between the lines, it is a publicity move to enhance the image of the NRA and they’re exploiting our children,” said Joseph DiLeonardi, Chicago’s deputy police superintendent.

Surprised at Reaction

NRA officials express surprise at the negative reaction to the book, which they hope to eventually provide free of charge to schools across the country.

“The message that we’re trying to teach children is that if they should find a gun, they should stop, don’t touch, leave the area and tell an adult,” said Tracey Martin, the NRA official who heads the coloring book program. “ . . . We pretty much thought safety was a non-controversial subject and certainly not a topic for a political debate, but it doesn’t appear that way.”

In addition to Dick and Jane, the book and an accompanying poster introduce a mascot called Eddie the Eagle who admonishes youngsters to: “Always be safe. Only with a parent should you be around guns.” The back cover of the pamphlet contains a message to parents which purports to declare neutrality in the gun control debate. “The purpose of this coloring book is to promote the protection and safety of children, not to teach whether guns are good or bad,” the statement declares.

Critics doubt the NRA’s sincerity. “The NRA has thwarted and attempted to stop every measure that’s been proposed--national, state and local--that would restrict the access to the very guns they now say are a safety problem,” said Arthur Smith, the director of the Illinois Council on Handgun Violence. “ . . . It’s kind of like saying ‘let’s have safe sex, but we don’t believe in condoms.’ ”

To bolster the book’s credibility, NRA officials point to endorsements from a group called the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police. But gun control advocates claim the police group is little more than a mail-drop front organization for the NRA.

Expressing alarm over news reports of handgun accidents involving youngsters, the NRA first offered the coloring book to public and Catholic school officials in Chicago two months ago. The idea was widely panned by both educators and law enforcement officials and neither school system is expected to allow the books into their classrooms. Officials in Dade County, Fla., which includes Miami, have also flatly rejected the book.

Nevertheless, NRA officials insist school administrators in several states have expressed interest. And James Zangrilli, an Illinois member of the group’s board of directors, said he is exploring ways to distribute it to Chicago children outside of the classroom.

So far, the only institution to utilize the publication has been the 325-student Christian Liberty Academy in Arlington Heights, Ill., an elementary school run by the Rev. Paul Lindstrom, a well-known conservative activist in the Chicago area.

Lindstrom said he approved of the coloring book in the same spirit that he endorsed other instructional programs that teach his students to avoid drugs, not to play with matches and to stay away from strangers who offer rides or gifts. “As educators, we have to deal with the real world,” Lindstrom argued. “The situation out there is that there are a lot of guns and that children do find guns . . . they ought to know how to deal with the situation.”

But James Fleming, the associate superintendent of the Dade County schools, said he found the message of the NRA publication to be dangerous as well as unrealistic. “When you’re dealing with 5-year-old children they get subliminal messages,” said Fleming. “ . . . You’re getting a message that somehow that’s the way life is, that it’s normal and natural that a gun would be sitting on a kitchen table. We want to show that guns are negative, they’re bad things, they are instruments of harm.”

After turning down the NRA’s gun safety program, the seven-member Dade school board last week unanimously approved a far more ambitious program that is actively anti-gun. Fleming said the action came in the wake of reports that at least 38 Miami-area children had been killed or injured over the last year in accidents involving firearms.

The board designated last Friday as “Gun Safety Awareness Day” and instructed principals to read a statement over their school public address sytems warning students about the dangers posed by guns. Borrowing a slogan from the anti-drug program, posters were distributed that urged youngsters to “Say no to guns.”

Next month, a local citizens group that regularly lectures Dade County school classes on crime prevention will add a section on gun safety. A more sophisticated presentation detailing what a bullet can do to the human body is also being prepared for high school students.

“The message that we’re trying to convey is that guns kill,” said Fleming. “Stay away from them. We’d all be better off if we could take every gun in the community and dump it in the ocean.”

Researcher Tracy Shryer also contributed to this story.