Guns in the Home: Do Parents Know What Their Children Are Doing?

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Summary and Comment

Guns in the Home: Do Parents Know What Their Children Are Doing?

Many children report more access to guns than their parents suspect.

Firearms are often present in homes with young children. Do the children know where the guns are kept? Have they handled them? To survey a representative sample of parents and children, researchers consecutively approached families attending a pediatric and family practice clinic in the American rural South. In each of 314 families who agreed to participate, the researchers separately interviewed one parent (usually the mother) and the youngest child (age range, 5–14; 46% younger than 10).

A total of 201 families had guns in the household: for recreation in 45%, for protection in 26%, and for both in 29%. Similar proportions of children younger than 10 and children 10 or older reported knowing the location of the guns (73% vs. 79%) and ever having handled them (36% of each group). Children’s reports that they knew where firearms were kept or that they had handled them contradicted 39% and 22% of parents’ reports, respectively.

Comment: These findings are especially important in light of recent epidemiologic studies showing that enactment of laws with a minimum purchase age or requiring household firearms to be secured from children is associated with lower rates of teen suicide with firearms (see Journal Watch Psychiatry Sep 8 2004). A clinical take-home message is that we need to ask children privately about firearms in the home.

— Barbara Geller, MD

Published in Journal Watch Psychiatry June 7, 2006