In two recent high-profile cases, the parents of suspected school shooters have been criminally charged, in part based on allegations that they knew their teenage children were a potential danger to others but allowed them access to guns.
In late 2021, the parents of a 15-year-old who killed four fellow students at Oxford High School in southeastern Michigan were charged in separate cases with four counts of involuntary manslaughter each, days after the shooting took place.
Prosecutors accused them of not getting mental health help for their son, and not securing the gun used in the shooting. In early 2024, they were each found guilty on all counts, and each sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in prison. They were the first parents in the U.S. to be found criminally liable following a mass shooting committed by their child.
Earlier this month, the day after a 14-year-old boy allegedly shot and killed two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in northern Georgia, his father was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said during a Sept. 6 news conference.
In 27 states and Washington, it is illegal to negligently store firearms, though specifics vary by state, according to a July 2024 analysis by researchers at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization and think tank. Nine states only make it illegal to “recklessly provide firearms to children,” according to the analysis.
“These laws are often considered weaker than negligent-storage laws,” write the authors. “Recklessness requires that the actor was aware of the risks involved in their actions, while negligence only requires that they should have been aware,” citing the American Law Institute.
It’s important that journalists covering gun safety know the details of child access prevention and safe storage laws in their state, including the types of firearms covered, whether the law specifies the type of storage devices required and potential penalties.
Child access prevention laws are those that “impose criminal liability on adults if a child gains access to an unsecured firearm or the gun is stored in a manner where the child is likely to gain access to it,” according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
Secure storage laws require that guns be locked away, but they do not necessarily impose criminal liability on the gun owner if a child gains access to the gun and shoots themselves or others. There are several storage options, such as gun safes and trigger locks, and storage requirements depend on state law.
Missouri in 1981 became the first state to enact a child access prevention law, according to research in the Journal of Law and Economics.
Michigan passed its law in 2023, following the Oxford High shooting.
The Michigan law requires that adults who own firearms and have children living at home store their weapons securely.
There are no initiatives related to child access prevention laws on state ballots in 2024, according to an analysis by Jennifer Mascia, a senior news writer at The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates gun violence in the U.S.
If a child in Michigan obtains a gun that is not securely stored and kills someone, the gun owner is subject to felony charges and up to 15 years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines, with lesser penalties if the child injuries someone.
In Georgia, it is illegal for anyone “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly to sell or furnish a pistol or revolver to a minor,” though the law doesn’t specify if or how a handgun should be locked away. The law would not have applied to the rifle used in the Apalachee High shooting.
To help journalists provide important context on gun policy in their ongoing coverage of school shootings and other types of gun violence, we look at what the research says about whether child access prevention laws are effective at preventing this and other types of gun violence.
The research finds:
- Nearly 3 in 4 Americans support safe storage policies, including 57% of gun owners in one nationally representative survey.
- Associations between child access prevention laws and school shootings are unclear, though there is scant research on the topic. One paper did find that high school students were less likely to carry a gun anywhere after their state enacted a safe storage law.
- There is stronger evidence that child access prevention laws are associated with lower rates of self-harm among children, as well as lower rates of homicides committed by children.
- Child access prevention laws are not a cure-all. They are one policymaking tool among many that, combined, can reduce firearm-related deaths.
Public support for safe firearm storage
Americans generally support legislation that requires safe storage of guns, according to recent polling. A 2023 survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions reached a nationally representative sample of 3,096 U.S. adults, including 1,002 gun owners, asking if they support requiring safe storage when guns are not in use.
The sample included 730 Republicans, 1,199 Democrats and 1,163 Independents. Overall, 72% of respondents supported safe storage, including 87% of Democrats, 59% of Republicans, 58% of gun owners and 79% of people who don’t own a gun.
Another survey, published in October 2024 in the Journal of Criminal Justice, examined whether parents should be charged when their kids commit gun violence with unsecured firearms. The authors polled a nationally representative sample of 1,018 adults.
About two-thirds — 64% — supported criminal charges for parents who store a firearm unsafely and whose children kill someone with the gun. The authors asked about such charges after presenting respondents with several versions of a similar vignette, varying the age of the child, type of firearm used, and type of violence committed.
Further, the authors found that 32% of politically conservative respondents supported safe storage laws, while 80% of everyone else supported those laws. Still, the authors note that one-third of conservative Americans supporting safe storage would represent a significant number of people.
“These results caution against stereotyping those on the right wing and who harbor nationalist sentiments as anti-gun-control,” the authors write. “They have a diversity of views, and some might be allies for certain reforms, such as safe-storage laws.”
School shootings
There isn’t much research on associations between child access prevention laws and school shootings and the findings that exist don’t reveal a clear relationship. An August 2018 paper in the Journal of Law and Economics is among the first to explore this relationship. The authors analyze data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System covering 1993 to 2013.
The CDC survey is conducted every two years among high school and middle school children and asks health-related behavioral questions across a range of topics, such as seat belt use, driving under the influence and carrying a weapon on school property. Since 1991, the poll has reached a total of 5 million high school students.
The sample in the paper examines responses from high schoolers in 13 states and the District of Columbia, before and after child access prevention laws were passed. The states are Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
The authors associate child access prevention laws with an estimated 18.5% reduction in high schoolers surveyed reporting carrying guns anywhere at least once within a one-month timeframe, and a 19% drop in students being threatened or injured with a weapon while at school.
School shootings do not necessarily lead to states passing child access prevention laws, the authors find. Neither do the authors identify that those laws affect the likelihood of a school shooing occurring. But they caution that with “many explanatory variables and a relatively small number of events, it is difficult to detect an effect.”
In other words, there are many reasons someone may commit a school shooting, or be prevented from doing so, and those are difficult to capture in a statistical analysis. While child access prevention laws seem to reduce the rates at which children carry guns in general, the relationship between those laws and school shootings is muddier.
A more recent study, published in October 2021 in the Journal of Criminal Justice, focuses on the relationship between gun ownership and school shootings, but also explores whether policy measures, such as child access protection laws, have any effect.
The authors use a variety of data covering 1980 to 2019 from the U.S. Census, the National Center for Education Statistics and the State Firearm Law Database from the RAND Corporation, as well as school shooting data from the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security.
They find that most shootings at schools — 27% — stem from an argument, while 13% were related to gangs or drug activity. Of the 1,275 school shootings analyzed, 4% were “high-profile rampage and mass school shootings,” the authors write, though those incidents are “responsible for the second highest number of injured or killed victims.”
More than two-thirds of school shootings were at high schools, and the shooter used a handgun in more than 8 in 10 incidents. Another big takeaway from the paper: Three gun control regulations — required safety training for handgun buyers, a minimum age of 21 to purchase handguns, and child access prevention laws — showed “weak and inconsistent” links to incidents of gun violence in schools.
Likewise, the authors do not find “consistent evidence” that gun ownership is related to rates of school shootings.
“In spite of weak findings observed for child access prevention in this study, it may be that child access prevention laws need to be strengthened in certain ways, possibly enhancing consequences for gun owners who do not secure their firearms sufficiently,” the authors write.
Self-harm with firearms
Recent research indicates that child access prevention laws can help reduce the likelihood that a child will intentionally hurt themselves with a gun. About 1,582 children 17 years old or younger died by suicide in the U.S. in 2022, according to CDC data compiled by KFF, a non-profit research and news organization focused on health policy.
A September 2021 paper published in The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry looks at whether child access prevention laws affect suicide rates among teens aged 14 to 18. The authors write that “there have been increases among adolescents of high school age in serious consideration of suicide, making a suicide plan, and injuries due to suicide attempts,” citing CDC survey data.
Among the 37,652 youth suicides during the study period, 1991 to 2017, the authors note that just over half involved firearms. For every 10 percentage-point increase in firearm ownership in a state, suicide among young people increased 7%. “The association between firearm ownership and suicide was approximately 2 times stronger among adolescents relative to adults,” the authors write.
Laws mandating safe storage of firearms were associated with a 13% reduction in suicides by firearm among young people, the authors find.
“The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages the use of trigger locks, lock boxes, gun safes, and safe storage legislation, and the results from this study and others suggest limiting access to firearms via [child access prevention] laws may be an important policy strategy for reducing youth suicides,” the authors conclude.
An April 2021 paper, published in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, examines whether the strength of child access prevention laws affects rates of suicides by firearm among people under age 24. The authors analyze CDC data on youth suicides from 41 states covering 1981 to 2017 and note that males make up 85% to 90% of suicides by firearm among younger people.
Federal data was unavailable in states with fewer than 10 firearm suicides in any given year. The authors excluded a state if there were more than 10 unreported years across the 37-year period, or if the state did not have data for two or more years in a row.
“Not all [child access prevention] laws are the same,” the authors note. In California, the law is relatively strict, they write, defining a minor as anyone under age 18 and including potential civil and criminal penalties for violators. Other states are less strict, with lower ages for minors, narrower definitions of negligence or limited penalties.
Across the country, the authors report 22 states without a child access prevention law, 22 states with a weak law, and six states with strong laws. Strong child access prevention laws were associated with an 8% lower rate of suicide by firearm among young people, compared with states without those laws. Weaker child access prevention laws did not show a statistically significant effect on youth suicides by firearm.
They report an even stronger association with minimum age laws. States that raised their minimum age for possession of a handgun to 21 saw a 13% drop in the suicide rate by firearm among young people.
The authors note that critics of gun control laws sometimes argue that the suicide rate by other means will increase if guns are restricted – that people intent on hurting themselves will find another way if a gun is not available. But the authors report “no evidence of a spike in nonfirearm suicides associated with the implementation of these gun laws.”
Homicides and fatalities
Do child access prevention laws prevent gun deaths apart from school shootings?
Recent research suggests they do.
The authors of a paper published in November 2021 in the Journal of Urban Economics use FBI data covering all states and Washington from 1985 to 2013 to assesses the relationship between those laws and rates of homicide committed by children under 18.
They find that child access prevention laws, particularly the stronger laws, are associated with a 17% drop in homicides committed by children using a gun.
This effect is “driven by states enforcing a negligent storage standard, the strictest form of [child access prevention] legislation,” the authors write. “Negligent storage laws impose criminal liability on individuals who allow a minor access to a firearm that was not properly stored.”
The authors don’t find a relationship between those laws and homicides committed by adults, or with homicides committed by children without a gun, “providing evidence that the relationship between [child access prevention laws] and juvenile firearm-related homicides is causal.”
A June 2020 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores how three types of gun laws — child access prevention, right-to-carry and stand your ground laws — influence overall firearm deaths rates, using statistical modeling and state policies that went into effect from 1970 and 2016.
The authors find that six years after being implemented, child access prevention laws are most likely to be associated with reductions in firearm deaths. Right-to-carry and stand your ground laws are more likely to be associated with increases in firearm deaths.
The authors write that there are 18 states with “the most permissive” combination of laws, meaning right-to-carry and stand your ground, but no child access prevention laws. “Our findings indicate that a 11% reduction in firearm deaths in these 18 states is achievable by moving these states to the restrictive policy regime,” meaning a child access prevention law, but not the other two.
Finally, a March 2020 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics examines the relationship between child access prevention laws and firearm fatalities among children up to age 14. The authors use CDC data on pediatric deaths from 1991 and 2016. There were 13,697 firearm deaths among children during that period, the authors write.
The authors associate child access prevention laws with a 13% drop in all types of firearm fatalities among children, including a 15% drop in firearm homicides, a 12% reduction in suicides by firearm and a 13% drop in unintentional firearm deaths.
As in other studies, this paper finds those reductions were most pronounced in states with stricter child access prevention laws focusing on negligent gun storage.
“The passage of stringent negligence [child access prevention] laws across all states may have the potential to reduce firearm fatalities in children by up to 29%,” the authors conclude.
A range of policy levers
As is the case with many complicated and politically challenging issues in the U.S., there is unlikely to be a single strategy that everyone agrees on that is broadly effective on its own at reducing gun violence. There are many factors that contribute to gun violence.
For example, gun violence and poverty are “intimately intertwined,” write the authors of a November 2022 paper in the Journal of Community Health. In looking at the effects of child access prevention laws from 2015 to 2019, they find that states with the strongest laws had lower rates of firearm deaths for Black children under 19 years old.
But when they adjusted for state-level poverty and the geographical density of firearm dealers, the relationship between child access prevention laws and firearm deaths of Black children was no longer statistically significant.
“[Child access prevention] laws alone can have a modest impact on non-Hispanic Black youth firearm mortality,” the authors write. “To adequately reduce firearm mortality among non-Hispanic Black youths, the state and local governments should, along with [child access prevention] laws, enact policies to reduce poverty, crime, access to firearms by criminals, and neighborhood dysfunction among non-Hispanic Black communities.”
Gun violence prevention measures, such as criminal penalties for negligently storing guns, may be ineffective if gun owners don’t know about them. The authors of a March 2022 paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,950 gun owners to understand whether child access protection laws affected their gun storage practices. About one-third of those surveyed lived in a household with a child under 18 years old.
Respondents in states with penalties for negligent storage were no more likely than those in states without those laws to lock their guns, the authors found. “In addition, most gun owners reported not knowing whether they lived in a state with a [child access protection law],” the authors write.
In recent decades, medical professionals have increasingly treated gun violence as a public health issue, and there is research about whether the doctor’s office is a good place to talk about safe firearm storage.
For doctors, challenges include not enough time during appointments and not enough training on how to facilitate those conversations, according to a February 2024 paper in the journal Patient Education and Counseling, based on interviews with 18 physicians.
Half of those interviewed mentioned that handouts would be helpful to engage gun-owning patients in safe storage education. “I think it would be phenomenal,” one doctor told the authors. “Some kind of brochure on how to do firearm safety, maybe with some links to other information if they want to learn. It would help me remember because we’d put it out front and keep some in the exam room to help trigger my questions.”
Research from October 2020 in the journal Clinical Pediatrics explored this topic — whether pamphlets worked to educate gun owners on safe storage. The authors created a trifold handout about safe gun storage and gun injuries among children, as well as child access prevention laws by state and other information.
The pamphlet was distributed at a major city hospital to English-speaking patients from July 8 to August 5, 2019. Follow-up surveys were completed by 107 patients. Some 58% of those surveyed said they were “more likely to store a gun safely” and 18% said they had taken steps to safely store guns after receiving the pamphlet.
The authors note that while the results are “promising,” they are based on a small survey at one hospital, and that they did not ask participants about gun ownership. Further research is needed to understand whether handouts could be useful in a health care setting to educate gun owners on safe storage, the authors write.
Subject experts
D. Mark Anderson, Montana State University
Cassandra Crifasi, Johns Hopkins University
Daniel Hamlin, The University of Oklahoma
Katherine Hoops, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Aaron Kivisto, University of Indiana
Joseph Sabia, San Diego State University
Terry Schell, RAND Corporation
Studies cited
Public Support for Safe-Storage Laws: White Nationalism and Politics as Barriers to Evidence-Based Gun Policy
Murat Haner, et. al. Journal of Criminal Justice, October 2024.
Child Access Prevention Laws and Non-Hispanic Black Youth Firearm Mortality
James Price & Jagdish Khubchandani. Journal of Community Health, November 2022.
Child Access Prevention Laws and Firearm Storage: Results From a National Survey
Matthew Miller, Wilson Zhang, Ali Rowhani-Rahbar and Deborah Azrael. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, March 2022.
Child Access Prevention Laws and Juvenile Firearm-Related Homicides
D. Mark Anderson, Joseph Sabia and Erdal Tekin. Journal of Urban Economics, November 2021.
Are Gun Ownership Rates And Regulations Associated With Firearm Incidents in American Schools? A Forty-Year Analysis (1980–2019)
Daniel Hamlin. Journal of Criminal Justice, October 2021.
Adolescent Suicide, Household Firearm Ownership, and the Effects of Child Access Prevention Laws
Aaron Kivisto, et. al. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, September 2021.
The Effect of State Gun Laws on Youth Suicide by Firearm: 1981–2017
Jack Kappelman and Richard Fording. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, April 2021.
Evaluating the Use of a Pamphlet as an Educational Tool to Improve Safe Firearm Storage in the Home
Katherine Hoops, et. al. Clinical Pediatrics, October 2020.
Changes in Firearm Mortality Following the Implementation of State Laws Regulating Firearm Access and Use
Terry Schell, et. al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2020.
Child Access Prevention Firearm Laws and Firearm Fatalities Among Children Aged 0 to 14 Years, 1991-2016
Hooman Alexander Azad, et. al. JAMA Pediatrics, March 2020.
Child-Access-Prevention Laws, Youths’ Gun Carrying, and School Shootings
D. Mark Anderson and Joseph Sabia. Journal of Law and Economics, August 2018.
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