Dog Shoots Person: A Story of American Gun Culture

Be responsible, lock up your guns

By: Devin Hughes

Imagine you are admitted to the ER with a gunshot wound, and when the authorities question how you were shot you have to admit that it was your best friend — your four-legged best friend, that is. 

Since 2014, 23 people have been shot by their dog resulting in two fatalities.

While it sounds comedic, this is not a story of angry dogs trying to usurp their owners (they aren’t cats, after all). This is a much more serious discussion of irresponsible owners not safely securing their firearms, which meant their dogs could accidentally step on the trigger or bump into the gun and cause it to discharge. Guns should not be lying around where a dog, or more importantly another human, can reach them.

Safe storage is an essential part of responsible gun ownership and “dog shoots person” incidents are a small symptom of a much larger sickness. 

To understand this phenomenon of dogs shooting people, we need to understand why Americans are leaving their guns unsecured. Starting in the 1960s, we saw a shift in the way guns were marketed to the American people — preying on people’s fear of being killed by a “bad guy with a gun,” and promising Americans that owning a gun would provide safety and self-protection. This narrative has gone so far that Americans are keeping their firearms within arms reach without knowing the dangers of keeping a loaded firearm unsecured in their home. 

Despite this growing fear, widespread defensive gun use is a myth.

There are fewer than 2,000 verified defensive gun uses annually. From 2014 to 2022, only 15 active shooter cases were successfully stopped by a civilian with a gun. For perspective, the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) reports more than 389,000 recorded incidents of gun violence in which 167,555 people were killed, not including suicides, since 2014. 

As you can see, defensive gun use is rare, yet accidents from unsecured guns are unfortunately not. During the past decade, at least 6,115 children and teenagers aged 0-17 were unintentionally shot, according to GVA. One-third of those children died. More children and teens die from unintentional shootings in the U.S. each year than people of any age from all other types of gun violence combined in other high-income countries such as England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and others.  

These unintentional gun deaths and injuries are entirely preventable. Strong Child Access Prevention laws such as Ethan’s Law — which is currently working its way through Congress — reduce unintentional shootings, as well as suicides and homicides, among children and teens.

Even without these important laws, gun owners should safely store firearms on their own to avoid tragic outcomes.

Approximately 4.6 million children live in homes with unsecured firearms. If your child is visiting a friend's home, simply asking whether firearms are stored safely can save life.

Don’t be the next “dog shoots person” story, or even worse, contribute to the growing number of children unintentionally shot with an unsecured gun. Be responsible. Lock up your guns.

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Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.