Kids Will Be Kids and Guns Will Be Guns Firearm Risk and Child Development

Firearm Risk and Child Development

• Normal child development poses risks that are particularly high when children are exposed to lethal weapons.
• Parents may underestimate children’s and adolescents’ risk around firearms.
• Telling children and adolescents not to touch a gun is not enough to prevent firearm violence.
• Prevention of firearm violence requires adult responsibility, including removal of or securely locking firearms.

Firearm injury accounts for nearly 18% of all deaths in the U.S., almost as many deaths as those by car crashes. Over the past several decades, firearm injury rates have increased, largely driven by self-inflicted shootings. Gun suicides usually occur in a victim’s own home, most often with a family gun.

Firearm injury can disrupt normal child development – immediately and, as with fatal firearm injury, irrevocably. Even non-fatal gun injury can cause physical, emotional and mental trauma to injured victims, unintentional child shooters, children who have lost loved ones, fully functioning caretakers and youth in the community who react to noises and conflict with anxiety or a disordered stress response.

It is estimated that there are more guns than people in the U.S. With so many around, children do find them. Too often, this leads to devastating accidents in which children are shot, shoot or both. When children are shot accidentally, the shooter is usually a family member. Unintentional child shooters shoot themselves most often, followed by siblings, other family members and friends. The vast majority of these shootings take place in a home – the child’s, or that of someone known to the child – and with a gun owned by a relative (most often the child’s father). Almost invariably, the gun was left unlocked. These are some of the reasons why firearm injury might be considered “America’s most preventable disease.”

Normal Child Development and Risk of Firearm Injury

Childhood is a time of incredibly rapid growth – physical, emotional and intellectual. As children journey through development, they increasingly engage with their environment. Every developmental stage means children are reaching forward – beyond their current habits, and sometimes out of view and reach of the most caring of parents. Exploring puts them in contact with new objects and contexts, often with a degree of risk. Babies roll off the edge of a bed, toddlers reach for what they should not put in their mouths, schoolchildren run off the curb and teens experiment in all sorts of ways.

As children progress, parents may not always understand their full developmental capacities. They may not recognize that a toddler has the strength to pull a trigger, that a young child’s curiosity will lead him to find the unlocked firearm, and that even normal and nice teenagers will sometimes act emotionally and impulsively after an argument or a disappointment.

Wanting to protect our children, we may wish that it is enough to tell them “no.” Good intention has led to the creation of educational programs aimed at children. Most of these programs emphasize the simple message of “Don’t touch; leave the area and find an adult.” The best-known of these programs is the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Eddie Eagle GunSafe® Program. Yet there is no evidence that any of these programs are at all effective. In fact, as these studies have demonstrated, even after education by adults, including law enforcement officers, most young boys will still handle a gun if found and about half will actually pull the trigger.

Against such evidence, or perhaps unaware of it, a majority of parents report that their kids know better than to handle a gun if they find one, and many gun owners with children in the house do not lock all their guns. A quarter of gun-owning parents who say their child has never touched their gun have children who contradict them, reporting that they know where the family gun is and that they have already handled it. Relying on children not to act as children puts them at risk of injury. Almost half of gun-owning parents say they believe children younger than 6 years can tell the difference between a real gun and a toy gun –a difficult task for most adults, including law enforcement. Parental overconfidence in a child’s abilities and restraint can lead to deadly outcomes.

The best means of prevention is to reduce access to firearms. Children and adolescents in homes without guns have been shown to have less risk of suicide, homicide and unintentional injury. Keeping all guns locked also has a protective effect.

Some 40% of homes with children also keep guns. A majority of the gun-owning parents see their firearms as a means to protect their families. All parents need to be aware of the joys and risks of normal child development – curiosity, exploration, experimentation, independence, impulsivity and even some disobedience. Parents may not recognize how frequently unlocked guns are kept in places where their children visit. All parents can be encouraged to be more aware of the risk of firearm injury, and to lock or remove guns that children may access – as well as to speak with others about the risk before their children visit a new environment.