Study Estimates 7 Million U.S. Children Live in Homes With Unlocked, Loaded Firearms

Nearly 7 million children in the United States live in homes with at least one firearm that is unlocked and loaded, according to a study published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open. An estimated 32 million children live in homes with firearms overall. The findings come from a survey of nearly 900 parents of kids under 18 who own guns.

Researchers found that 21 percent of those surveyed had at least one firearm unlocked and loaded, a figure that translates into the estimated 7 million children nationwide. Matthew Miller, the lead author and a public health researcher at Northeastern University, said the 21 percent figure represents the least safe storage method. "So you pick it up, and you can fire it," Miller said.

Nearly 35 percent of the surveyed gun-owning parents said they stored firearms unloaded and locked up. Parents of children under 13 are more likely to keep firearms unloaded and locked away compared to parents of teenagers. Firearms have been the leading cause of death among children and teens since 2020, Dr.

Chethan Sathya said. While a majority of those deaths are due to homicides, a significant percentage are suicides, Miller stated. "When children take their own lives purposefully, in a suicide, the gun almost always comes from their home," Miller said.

Safe storage of firearms reduces the risk of dying by firearm suicide by threefold. The risk of suicide is higher for teenagers, Miller noted. He said parents of teenagers should take just as much care to unload and lock away their firearms as parents of younger children.

Unsafe firearm storage also increases the risk of unintentional injuries and of mass shootings, Sathya said. Sathya is a pediatric surgeon and director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health. "This study sheds further light on the fact that there are millions of kids living in this country, in households where weapons are readily available and often not locked up," Sathya said.

Miller and his colleagues noted in their study that past efforts to convince gun-owning households with kids to safely store their firearms haven't succeeded. Sathya sees reasons for optimism from work at his own health system, where clinicians routinely screen all patients for risk of gun violence.

"We've had over 200,000 of those conversations and we've demonstrated a substantial number of those families do end up safely storing guns as a result of the conversation," Sathya said.

Those conversations should include modern technologies for safe storage that do not impede a gun owner's access, he added, citing smart guns, smart holsters and new biometric finger safes. Npr reported that anyone in crisis can text, chat or call 988 to speak to a counselor with the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.