In light of the new research establishing how great the toll of gun violence is on children and teens under 18 years old, many parents may be thinking about what they can do to keep their children safe. What can be done to reduce the risk that your child will become a statistic?
There three main steps you can take, expanded upon below. First, remove all firearms from the home. Second, if you are unable or unwilling to remove all guns from the home, stored them unloaded in a locked safe with ammunition locked up elsewhere. Third, ask the household members of every home your child visits whether they have firearms in the home and, if so, whether they are safely stored as above.
Step one: If someone in your household owns guns but would consider not having them in the home, the evidence shows that not having a gun in the home remains the safest way to protect everyone in the household from gun violence. That doesn’t necessarily mean selling or otherwise getting rid of the guns, especially if they’re a family heirloom and it’s important to someone to keep in the family. It could mean locking them up at a different location or requesting that a trusted friend or family member without children at home hold onto them (also locked up).
Step Two: If your household contains guns, and your family has chosen to maintain them there, the safest way to store them is unloaded, locked in a safe with a trigger lock, with the ammunition locked up in a different location. One review of 16 studies found that keeping a gun in the home triples the odds of suicide and doubles the odds of homicide in that home—but the study didn’t take into account how the guns were stored. Storing a gun safely and reducing its access to others in the household (such as only one person having the combination to a safe) may significantly reduce these odds.
Some gun owners argue that securing firearms with these restrictions makes it impossible to be prepared to use the gun for self-defense. In that case, do risk-benefit assessment. Do you live in a neighborhood where violence occurs daily? Where you hear gunshots outside your windows on at least a weekly basis? If so, you may need to explore options such as a bedside biometric locked safe that you can rapidly access but no one else can.
If that doesn’t describe your neighborhood, however, you may be mistaken in your belief about how necessary that gun is for self-defense. The average person needing a gun for self defense is extremely rare, according to FBI data, and rates of defensive gun use are dramatically exaggerated. (Bizarrely, even the NRA has acknowledged in a propaganda video how rare it is and suggests you might be that one person who needs it.) One national study found no link between owning a gun and homicides of a stranger in the home. (And using a gun in self-defense isn’t necessarily the best choice anyway.)
One study, for example, looked at use of guns over one year in homes in Seattle, Washington; Memphis, Tennessee; and Galveston, Texas. The results were stark: “For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” That’s four accidental shootings for each successful use of self-defense. And one third of all the justifiable or self-defense shootings were by law enforcement, who regularly train to maintain their firearm skills under pressure.
Remember, just the presence of a gun in the home more than doubles risk of suicide and increases the risk of homicide (amounts vary) in that home. It’s not so much that presence of a gun leads people to commit suicide. Rather, thousands of people think about or attempt suicide every year, and if a gun is available, they’ll try that method first. And it’s more successful than any other method.
Finally, step three: keeping a gun out of your own home — or at least ensuring it’s as safely secured as possible — is fully within your control. (If it’s not, seek help.) But what about others’ homes? The only way to know if there is a firearm in a home your child visits is to ask. I’ve written about this before, and I reran the numbers for 2015. There were 2,724 accidental non-fatal firearm injuries in 2015 for children and teens 19 and younger (745 for age 14 and younger). Another 100 children and teens died from accidental gunshots last year, and half of them were under 15. But those are just the reported accidental injuries, almost certainly a significant underestimate. And it excludes all intentional shootings where your child may simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Does that mean you should ask if there are poisons out and about in the home? If a lighter or matches are accessible? If every knife is locked away? If every possible thing that can injure a child is locked up in the home? No, it doesn’t. Because most people are aware of the dangers of those items whereas awareness about the danger of guns in a home is often downplayed or misunderstood. Many Americans are in denial about the statistics above. And most of those items above also don’t kill in a second. There’s often time to get the child treatment or get them to the hospital. That’s less often the case with guns.
It may feel uncomfortable or awkward to ask someone whether they have a gun in their home and how it’s stored, and some people will undoubtedly get defensive. But it’s worth it. Tomorrow is National Ask Day, and the website has a toolkit if you want to get involved. A post tomorrow will offer suggestions on how to have that conversation and why putting your child through a gun safety program or otherwise teaching them not to touch guns — while not a bad idea — won’t protect them if they come across a gun in real life.
