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One Simple Way to Reduce Gun Violence Among Children

One Simple Way to Reduce Gun Violence Among Children

Unlike the rise and fall and rise of violent crime, which follows a logic that researchers can find elusive, shootings by children are relatively easy to understand and even predict. They would also be far easier to prevent — if only adults would stop making guns so readily available.

The costs of that failure are adding up. Last year was a banner year in firearm deaths among children. If you follow groups such as the Gun Violence Archive or social media accounts such as Well Regulated Militia, you can track the carnage daily. More than 1,500 children under 18 were killed by firearms in 2021. According to Everytown for Gun Safety , there were 342 unintentional shootings by children last year. The result, 141 deaths and 219 injuries, was slightly less than in 2020 (369 unintentional shootings) but more than in 2019 (308).

The variety of these shootings — child shoots self, child shoots child, child shoots adult, child shoots classmates — is superficial. All follow an identical formula: Adult makes gun available to minor. The only distinction is whether access is granted by negligence or design. The first is how a 1-year-old in Texas shot his mother and 3-month-old sibling this month. The second is how a disturbed 15-year-old obtained a firearm for his alleged shooting spree at a Michigan high school last fall.

The most effective way to prevent unintentional gun injuries and deaths to children, notes the American Academy of Pediatrics, is not to keep guns at home in the first place, or even in the community. In lieu of convincing American gun owners to part with firearms, however, the AAP recommends that “all guns in your home should be locked and unloaded, with ammunition locked separately.”

This seems like a more achievable goal, and the benefits are likely significant. One research simulation suggests that anywhere from 6% to 32% of firearm deaths among those 19 and younger could be prevented by more widespread adoption of safe storage.

Yet according to a Rand Corporation analysis, “fewer than half of the U.S. families with firearms and children store firearms locked (either in a locked place or secured with a trigger lock) and separate from ammunition.” About 2.6 million children, by Rand’s count, have access to lethal firepower. In a 2018 study, little more than one third of gun-owning parents who self-reported having a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression or another mental health condition, said they stored their guns locked and unloaded. The danger to communities is compounded because those same unsecured guns are a boon to criminals; an estimated 380,000 guns are stolen each year.

Locking guns is not difficult. You can do it with expensive gun safes or cheap trigger locks. (You can even get a gun lock for free if you live in Philadelphia, or from many local police departments.) But safe gun storage has never been a cause championed by the gun movement, which focuses on expanding gun possession, not making it less dangerous. SecureIt Tactical, Inc., for example, a gun safe company based in Syracuse, N.Y., markets its products as a departure from “traditional gun safes” that, the company says, “work against you.” SecureIt promotes multiple gun safes per home to afford “fast access without sacrificing security.”

Safe storage runs counter to a gun culture that not only glorifies guns, but often trivializes them, transforming lethal machines into toys. Have an emotionally disturbed teen? Take him to the range and get him comfortable shooting at targets. Want to show your 9-year-old a fun time? Let her shoot an Uzi.

For those who fetishize guns, the call for safe storage is less a call to conscience than an attack on their identity. The National Rifle Association website advises gun owners to “store guns so they are not accessible to unauthorized persons”; at the same time the NRA opposes safe-storage laws.

NRA propagandist Wayne LaPierre has spent decades telling his flock that they can’t afford to let down their guard for even a moment. The lone gunslinger, LaPierre said in a jolly 2014 speech, faces “terrorists, home invaders, drug cartels, car jackers, ‘knock-out’ gamers, rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse a society that sustains us all.”

When a vicious wave of chemicals knocks at your door, you simply don’t have time to retrieve your gun and ammunition from a locked safe.

Inhabitants of gun culture’s paranoia-verse aren’t the only gun owners resistant to safety. Others are so willfully negligent it’s hard to imagine what might get through to them. A lawyer once told me of a client whose young daughter had found his gun and shot a bullet into the wall of their home. Even after that episode, the client failed to secure his gun. The same girl later found the gun in her father’s bag. This time she used it to kill her sister.

Still, among the parents of those 2.6 million vulnerable children are plenty of adults who might benefit from reminders about the lethal danger of a loaded gun in the nightstand or in the console of the car. With so many guns in America — almost 400 million, after a Covid sales boom — and so few regulations on who can own them, pointless violence is guaranteed. But more safe storage could reduce the toll — especially on children.

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Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, is a founder and financial supporter of Everytown.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes about U.S. politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously executive editor of the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.