Startling percentage of homes have unlocked, loaded guns, endangering kids, study finds
This month, a 12-year-old playing with a firearm in a Brooklyn apartment unintentionally shot and killed his cousin, officials said. Three days later, a 5-year-old boy with a loaded handgun shot and killed himself in a Maryland home, according to reports.
The two events are among the array of gut-wrenching scenes that play out each year when family members fail to secure firearms, according to a new federal report. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published Thursday looked at data on families with children and loaded firearms in their homes in a handful of states. In at least 25 percent of these homes, at least one loaded gun was left unsecured.
“Out-of-sight and out-of-reach is not secure storage,” Tom Simon, acting co-director of CDC’s division of violence prevention and a study co-author, told Paste BN. Often, he added, parents think their children aren't aware they have a gun in the house, or they think because they've scolded their child for playing with their gun, the child won't try to access it. “They hope that’s enough,” he said. “It’s just often not.”
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These tragedies are entirely avoidable, according to Sarah Burd-Sharpe, senior director of research at the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
“Roughly once every day in the United States, a child under the age of 18 gains access to a loaded gun and unintentionally shoots themself or someone else,” Burd-Sharpe said in a statement. “But there is no such thing as an accidental shooting by a child – the onus to store guns securely and keep them out of reach of children is always on adults.”
Earlier research found most fatal unintentional firearm deaths among children occur in a house or apartment due to weapons that were loaded and left unlocked. Children often die playing with a weapon or when showing it to a friend, CDC researchers noted.
Having a firearm in the home increases the risk of homicides or suicides in a household. Safe storage, such as keeping a firearm unloaded and locked in a gun cabinet, can reduce the risk of children being accidentally shot.
The study drew from over 53,000 respondents across eight states to questions about firearms in homes in 2021 and 2022. Overall, about half of people with a loaded firearm said they stored at least one loaded weapon in an unsecured, unlocked place, the CDC report found.
Results varied by state. In California, less than one-fifth of respondents said they kept firearms in or around their homes. More than half of respondents kept guns in Alaska. For those with a weapon at home, 19.5% of people in Minnesota kept the firearm loaded, compared with nearly 44% in North Carolina.
In March, Everytown released research showing that in 2023, more children were involved in unintentional shootings than in any year since tracking began in 2015. Since then, the group has documented 3,200 unintentional shootings by children, including more than 400 in 2023 alone.
Simon, the CDC researcher, noted the 2021 and 2022 data used in the report isn't nationally representative and it relied on respondents self-reporting on their behavior. In the future, federal officials may have better data to work with, as more states are asking about firearm safety.