To Get Parents to Lock Up Guns: Give Them a Lock

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Parents who own guns are more apt to lock them up safe from curious little hands if they are given a free gun lock and a brief gun-safety talk by their pediatrician, results of a new study show. The study provides "reason to be optimistic" that a brief gun-safety counseling intervention coupled with a take-home gun-safety brochure and free gun lock can boost the number of gun-owning families that safely store their firearms, researchers say.

Overall, gun-owning families who participated in the gun-safety intervention were more than twice as likely to show improvement in their gun storage behaviors as were those who received no intervention.

Dr. Paul S. Carbone of the Children's Primary Care Medical Group in San Diego and colleagues report their findings in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine this month. Out of 2,649 parents in a large predominantly Hispanic pediatric clinic in Tucson, Arizona, 206 families -- roughly 8 percent -- said they kept guns in the home.

Carbone's team randomly assigned these families to either an intervention consisting of gun-safety counseling, gun-safety brochure, and a free gun lock or to no intervention. Families were re-surveyed one month later to determine changes in gun ownership and gun storage practices. A total of 151 of the 206 families were included in the final analysis.

At the one-month follow-up, significantly more families in the gun-safety intervention group either removed all guns from their homes or improved their safe gun storage practices in some way (62 percent versus 27 percent).

Among the households still with guns at follow-up, nearly 51 percent of the intervention group had displayed some type of improvement in gun safety storage compared to only about 12 percent of the control families. More specifically, one quarter of the intervention families improved the frequency with which they locked up their guns compared with less than 5 percent of those in the control group.

This study, Carbone and colleagues say, supports the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommendations that pediatricians discuss gun safety with parents and further suggests that providing gun locks to parents may help achieve the desired outcome: getting parents to lock up their guns.

Dr. M. Denise Dowd, from Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri writes in a related commentary that the AAP states the "safest way to prevent gun injury among children is to remove guns from the places children live and play." However, the reality is that "approximately 35 percent of homes with children younger than 18 years have at least one gun, and of these, 43 percent contain at least one unlocked firearm."

"In light of recent evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of safe storage in preventing unintentional and self-inflicted firearm injury and death for children and adolescents, it is imperative that we find practical and effective ways to improve safe gun storage," Dowd writes.

A "major strength" of the current study, she adds, is that families were given a "tangible means to risk reduction: a gun lock."

SOURCE: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, November 2005.