Children at risk in homes with loaded, unlocked guns, CDC study finds

Lina Portman3 weeks ago

0 2 minutes read

This month, a 12-year-old playing with a gun in a Brooklyn apartment unintentionally shot and killed his cousin, officials said. Three days later, a 5-year-old boy with a loaded handgun killed himself in a Maryland home, according to reports.

Both events are part of a series of heartbreaking scenes that occur each year when family members fail to obtain firearms, according to a new federal report. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released Thursday looked at data on families with children and loaded guns in their homes in a handful of states. In at least 25 percent of these homes, at least one loaded gun was unsecured.

“Out of sight and out of reach is not safe storage,” Tom Simon, acting co-director of the CDC's violence prevention division and co-author of the study, told USA TODAY. Often, he added, parents think their children don't know they have a gun in the house, or because they scolded their child for playing with his gun, the child n will not attempt to access it. “They hope this will be enough,” he said. “That’s often not the case.”

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These tragedies are entirely preventable, according to Sarah Burd-Sharpe, senior director of research at the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.

“About once a day in the United States, a child under the age of 18 has access to a loaded gun and unintentionally shoots themselves or someone else,” Burd-Sharpe said in a statement. “But there is no such thing as accidental shooting by a child: it is always the responsibility of adults to store guns safely and keep them out of reach of children.”

Previous research has found that most accidental firearm deaths among children occur in a home or apartment due to guns being loaded and left unlocked. Children often die playing with a gun or showing it to a friend, CDC researchers noted.

Having a gun in the home increases the risk of homicide or suicide in a home. 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 brought together more than 53,000 respondents in eight states to answer questions about guns in homes in 2021 and 2022. Overall, about half of people owning a loaded firearm said having stored at least one loaded gun in an unsecured, unlocked location, according to the CDC report. .

Results varied by state. In California, less than a fifth of respondents reported keeping guns in or around their home. More than half of those surveyed owned firearms in Alaska. Among those who own a gun at home, 19.5 percent of Minnesotans kept the firearm loaded, compared to nearly 44 percent in North Carolina.

In March, Everytown released a study 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 committed by children, including more than 400 in 2023 alone.

Simon, the CDC researcher, noted that the 2021 and 2022 data used in the report is not nationally representative and relies on respondents' self-reporting of their behavior. In the future, federal officials may have better data to work with as more states question gun safety.

Lina Portman

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