The Guns In Our Houses Pose The Greatest Threat To Children’s Lives

In the wake of mass shootings at Annunciation Catholic School and Evergreen High School, parents and students alike are back on high alert, feeling a renewed sense of anxiety about heading off to school each day. But while school shootings happen more frequently than they did 50 years ago, they still only account for a slim fraction of gun-related deaths, according to a new report from NPR, which highlights that roughly half of gun owners don’t follow safe storage guidelines. While school shootings understandably loom the largest in our minds, it’s the loaded gun hidden under the bed at home that poses the biggest risk to kids.

Between 2015 and 2024, more than 3,500 incidents occurred in which a child under 18 accidentally shot themselves or someone else, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. That’s an average of about 360 children per year, nearly one accidental gun injury or death every day. Nine in 10 of those wounded or killed in unintentional shootings by children were also under 18 years old, the report found, often a friend or sibling of the child holding the gun.

Firearms are the leading cause of death for U.S. children and teens, but homicide and suicide account for more fatalities than accidental shootings. Still, these acts are most often carried out with guns found in the home, not securely stored.

To compare, there have been nearly 1,300 cases of gunfire on school grounds in the same time frame — still a staggering amount, but not the most pressing risk to American children. And when it comes to this risk of kids being harmed by guns at home, we don’t need systemic change to reduce it. Parents can do that themselves.

Improperly stored guns are the biggest risk to children’s lives, but they’re a risk we have control over.

“Of the people who have a gun in their home, nearly half of participants said their firearm was stored in an unlocked location and more than one-third said a gun was stored loaded. More than half said at least one gun is stored in the same location as the ammunition,” the NPR report says.

So, what’s the gold standard, safest way to store a firearm, if you own one? “The safest way to keep a gun, if you choose to have a gun in your home, is unloaded, locked with a gun lock, secured in a safe, with the ammunition stored separately in a lock box,” said Dr. Jose Prince, M.D., member of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health and surgeon-in-chief of Cohen Children’s Medical Center, in an interview with Romper. These storage guidelines are also promoted by The American College of Surgeons.

The organization says that roughly two-thirds of accidental child gun deaths could be prevented if guns were stored this way, making it harder for young children to happen upon a gun in a parent’s nightstand drawer or tucked away in a closet, or for older children to use them for self-harm. Data shows they’re right: states with secure storage or child-access prevention laws have the lowest rates of unintentional child shootings, according to Everytown.

Why aren’t all gun owners storing their firearms this way? A 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 7 in 10 gun owners say personal protection is the main reason they own a gun, which translates to them wanting their gun more accessible and ready to use than those safe storage guidelines would allow. The presumed logic is that for a firearm to be ready to use in a home intrusion, it has to remain ready all the time.

“There is no in-the-middle for this. Kids will find that gun in the drawer; kids will climb into that closet and play. I see the tragedies that happen, the 3-year-old who finds the gun in the drawer and then shoots themselves or shoots their sibling. By then, it’s too late,” Prince, who is also a father and recreational shooter, told Romper. “The world is bad, and folks sometimes believe they need to have a firearm to make themselves feel safe in their home. But the data says something very different from that. That firearm is much more likely to hurt someone in the home than an intruder.”

Experts encourage parents to ask other parents if they own firearms and how they store them before taking their child over to play. It’s also important to talk to your children early and often about what to do if they come across a gun at a friend’s house, for example, and prepare them for what to do.

“For families that have firearms and want to store them safely, have those conversations with the kids that [guns are] not to be touched. For kids who don’t have a firearm in their home, but if they ever go to someone’s house and there’s a firearm, teach them to stop, not to touch it, and to run away from it as fast as possible and tell an adult that there’s a gun,” said Prince. “Whether I have a firearm in my home or not, my children will be in homes that have firearms, legal or illegal. And so I think this kind of conversation is important, no matter who you are, if you’re raising children in the United States.”