GVPanorama: What Parents Should Know About Gun Safety in the Home and Vehicle
These steps can help protect kids from gun violence
While on the search for recent gun violence prevention news for our weekly "Friday Finds” feature, we often come across editorials, personal stories, or wider-lens articles that don’t necessarily fit into a current events window. With GVPanorama, we will highlight some of these thought-provoking pieces.
Today’s GVPanorama reshare comes from JAMA Pediatrics, a monthly, peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association.
While we here at GVPedia believe it’s probably not a great idea to have loaded weapons around children in general, if you do have one in your home or car, this is a great primer on how to safely store them.
As is now sad common knowledge, gun are currently the #1 cause of death for children in the United States, and a great number of those deaths are not just from crime. As JAMA explains in the piece, “younger children are more commonly injured unintentionally. Curious toddlers can find guns and fire them quickly. Older children and adolescents are more likely to be harmed by homicide or suicide.”
So it more than behooves adults to “make sure their guns are stored safely to prevent access by a child or adolescent.” In this article, JAMA covers the common misconceptions about safe gun storage; and succinctly explains how to be safe utilizing their Be SMART framework.
Check out the full article here.
Graphic from JAMA.
Lead image by Miguel R Perez Rivas from Pixabay