Guns in the home are proving deadly for kids
Communities, parents asked to take the lead
The boy had promised never to touch his mother’s handgun. But he was 12, and the gun was irresistible. He didn’t realize it was loaded.
He was showing the gun off to a neighbor, 12-year-old Brian Crowell, when it went off.
And just like that, Ann Marie Crowell lost her son.
She has spent the last 15 years trying to save other kids, by urging parents to ask whether there are guns in the home before sending their kids for play dates.
“I had never thought to ask about guns in the home,” says Crowell, of Saugus, Mass.
“If I owned a gun, I wouldn’t be mad that someone asked,” Crowell says. “If you were going over for a play date to a house with a swimming pool, wouldn’t you want them to lock the pool gate? As a parent, you want to do anything you need to do to protect your child.”
Although Congress voted down gun legislation in April, children’s advocates such as Crowell are urging parents and communities to take their own steps to protect kids.
Although mass shootings get more attention, statistics show children are more likely to be killed at home.
Nearly 800 children under 14 were killed in gun accidents from 1999 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Rarely does a week go by without a child killed accidentally by a gun.
This month, a 5-year-old Kentucky boy accidentally shot and killed his 2year-old sister in their home while playing with a rifle made for children.
Crowell says she’s aiming for common sense, not sweeping political change. Nearly 40% of American households have guns, studies show.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that pediatricians include a question about guns in the home when taking a patient’s history.
The academy’s policy statement on guns states that children are safest in homes without firearms.
If parents do own guns, pediatricians should counsel them about the need to store them safely, the academy says.
Storing guns locked and unloaded reduces the risk of both injuries and suicide by about 70%, according to a 2005 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Bill Brassard, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, agrees. “Safe storage is absolutely critical to preventing the misuse of firearms,” he says.
People who want quick access to a gun for security can still store them safely, Brassard says, with lockable boxes that can be opened with a key- pad. Most major firearm manufacturers now include a gun lock with new guns, Brassard says.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation says its 12-year-old ChildSafe program has distributed 35 million free firearm safety kits that include a gun-locking device and firearm-safety brochure.
Yet 29% of households with children under 12 fail to lock up their guns, according to a 2006 study.
Some see the pediatrics academy’s policy as a threat to gun owners’ rights.
In the past two years, six states have considered bills to prevent doctors from asking about guns in the home or recording that information into medical records. Only Florida’s bill passed. That law never went into effect, however, because it was blocked by a judge.
Advocates for gun-owners’ rights note that fewer children are dying from gun accidents today than a decade ago. The number of kids younger than 14 who died in gun accidents fell from 86 in 2000 to 62 in 2010, according to the CDC.
Yet progress has been uneven. Among the youngest children — those under age 4 — the number of accidental gun deaths more than doubled, to 25 in 2010.
Most parents believe their children are smart enough not to touch a gun, surveys show.
Yet in an experiment in which researchers observed how 8- to 12year-old boys behaved when left alone in a room with a hidden gun, 75% of boys found the gun within 15 minutes, says the study’s lead author, Arthur Kellermann, a policy analyst at RAND Corp., a think tank.
The gun was modified so it couldn’t fire, he says.
Of the boys who found the gun, 63% handled it and 33% pulled the trigger. More than 90% of those who handled the gun or pulled the trigger said they had received gun-safety instruction.
“What I don’t understand is why the industry hasn’t done more to make handguns childproof, since we have no evidence to date that it is possible to make children gunproof,” Kellermann says. “And as recent tragedies have proven, they are not bulletproof.”