Child deaths from guns at home more than doubled since 2010
In-home firearm homicides of children and teenagers have more than doubled since 2010, a new study suggests. File Photo by Leigh Vogel/UPI | License Photo
In-home firearm homicides of children and teenagers have more than doubled since 2010, a new study suggests.
Nearly a quarter of children and teenagers killed by guns died in their own homes between 2020 and 2021, including two-thirds of child victims 12 and under, researchers wrote in findings published Friday in JAMA Surgery.
These cases are most often associated with murder-suicide (23%); child abuse (20%); and intimate partner violence (17%), the study found.
What’s more, children are more likely to die by gunshot in their own home in states with looser gun control laws, additional results reported Friday at an American Academy of Pediatrics’ meeting in Denver indicate.
Kids were 28% less likely to be die by gunfire at home in states with tougher gun control legislation like red-flag laws on the books, researchers reported at the AAP meeting.
“This research shows that traditional home-based firearm injury prevention like safe storage such as locking guns away, may not be enough to prevent many of these tragic cases,” Dr. Jordan Rook, a surgical resident at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a news release. Rook served as lead researcher for both studies.
“Instead, policies that address risk factors for in-home homicide like intimate partner violence and child abuse, and which remove firearms from high-risk households, may be effective prevention strategies,” he said.
For the studies, researchers analyzed data gathered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on as many as 3,300 firearm-related homicides involving children 17 and younger.
To identify trends of in-home firearm violence, the researchers focused in on data from 14 states that had continuous statistics from 2005 to 2021.
The states were Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Of the total firearm deaths among kids and teens, 24% occurred at home and 76% outside the home.
The rate of in-home firearm homicides among children more than doubled from .18 per 100,000 in 2010 to .38 per 100,000 in 2021, the data showed.
About 63% of children 12 and younger who died by gunshot were killed at home, researchers found.
Results also showed that 42% of the deadly shootings were committed by a parent, in cases where assailants were identified in the records.
Firearm deaths were lowest in Massachusetts and highest in South Carolina, results showed.
The team found that “red flag laws” — which allow family members or police to petition to have guns removed from a dangerous home — were in place in five of the seven states with the lowest rates of in-home homicide.
By comparison, only two of seven states with the highest rates had red flag laws, researchers found.
“Given evidence that stronger state firearm laws are associated with fewer pediatric in-home homicides, future advocacy should seek to expand gun laws, including extreme risk protection orders which may prevent these cases by removing firearms from high-risk households,” Rook said.
Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
KFF has more on children, teens and gun violence.