We see the dangers of gun violence to children and teens almost daily. Kids are not safe at parades: Children were among the victims in the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade shooting last week, and an 8-year-old was shot and paralyzed at the Highland Park parade shooting in 2022.
Children are not safe at home, where they have been hit by stray bullets fired from outside or been victims of accidental shootings or murder. Children are not safe around their schools: five teenagers were shot outside their schools in the Chicago area recently, and three died. Over 100 children have been shot near their schools in Chicago in the last five years, an analysis found.
I am a doctor who takes care of children in the intensive care unit after they have been shot. Gun violence as a public health crisis feels close to me because of that. Firearm violence has been the leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the U.S. since 2017, and from 2018 to 2020, deaths among children due to guns rose by over 40%.
We protect children in motor vehicles by having them in car seats and having standards for safety for cars, helping to spark a decrease in fatalities due to motor vehicle injuries over the same period that injuries due to guns have risen. Why don’t we protect kids from guns?
We can keep kids safer by keeping unsupervised guns out of their hands. As a pediatrician, I know that one of the most effective ways to keep kids from getting injured or killed from guns is to prevent them from getting access to guns. Guns should be stored locked and unloaded, with ammunition locked separately. Over half of homes that have at least one gun — and there are many such households — do not store them safely. We know that parents who own guns want to keep their kids and loved ones safe. We must give them the tools and education to do so.
Not every death due to guns can be prevented by secure storage, but a lot of them might be. When the medical field thinks about firearms from a public health viewpoint, we often break it down into three rough categories: unintentional shootings, suicides and homicides. It is important to remember that no matter the mechanism, every one of these deaths is a tragedy, and that every one of them might have been preventable.
Gun safety begins at home
Unintentional shootings happen most often at home. Toddlers have the strength to pull the trigger on some guns. Even if parents do not think so, many kids likely do know where guns are stored in the household. We need to normalize talking to children and adolescents and to other parents about guns and safe storage, the same way we might talk about dangers if there is a pool or a trampoline.
Safe storage and parental responsibility is in the news for another reason. Jennifer and James Crumbley are the first parents to be charged in a mass school shooting committed by their child. Jennifer Crumbley was convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter on Feb. 6, one for each child her son shot and killed at a school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, in 2021.
Could this tragedy have been prevented? Maybe. There were multiple potential intervention points, but ultimately this gun was easily accessible to the shooter. Despite the parents’ early claims that the gun was securely stored, the teen himself stated in court: “It was not locked.” The jury foreperson stated: “For me, I just feel like Jennifer didn’t separate her son from the gun enough to save those lives that day.”
Many public health departments, including the Illinois Department of Public Health, give away free gun locks, and using these in households with children and adolescents should be as normal as using life jackets and seat belts for kids.
We can save lives. We have done it before with other injury-prevention campaigns for smoking, motor vehicles, and water safety. We can do it again by committing to secure storage of guns in households with children.
Dr. Deanna Behrens is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and is chair of the Firearms Violence Prevention Committee of the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
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