US Gun Safety Programs Show Little Effect: Report
Thu Jul 18, 5:54 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Educational programs aimed at cutting children's risk of gun injury have shown lukewarm results so far, according to a new report.

 

The report, issued Thursday by the Packard Foundation, says that education efforts targeting kids and parents--as well as laws to punish parents who fail to store their guns safely--are limited in their ability to prevent gun violence.

"The few behaviorally oriented programs to reduce youth gun injury and violence that have been evaluated have not shown great success," concludes report author Dr. Marjorie S. Hardy of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

According to Hardy's research review, efforts that have been aimed at parents "are not very effective" in convincing them to give up their guns or change the way they store them. These efforts mainly entail gun-safety counseling from the child's pediatrician or child access prevention (CAP) laws, which hold adults responsible for unsafe storage of guns. Seventeen US states have enacted CAP laws, while opponents question both their effectiveness and fairness, Hardy notes.

Education programs for children--including "Just Say No" approaches that teach kids to avoid guns--have been just as limited in their success, according the report.

"Evaluations of these programs remain very limited," Hardy writes, "and, unfortunately, no program has yet been proven to consistently succeed in keeping children from accessing and using guns."

According to the report, published in the current issue of the Foundation's journal The Future of Children, parents must protect their children from guns by monitoring kids carefully, and--if they choose to own a gun--by locking guns away, unloaded and separate from ammunition.

In addition, the report calls for tightening federal and state laws to limit young people's access to guns.

Hardy notes that the American Academy of Pediatrics holds that the "most reliable and effective way" to prevent child gun injuries is to "remove guns from children's homes and communities."

SOURCE: The Future of Children 2002;12:101-113.

Quoted:
Being that the overall gun accident and murder rate has been dropping steadily for the past 15 years while the number of firearms in circulation has gone up, I'd say that report is pure unadulterated anti-gun propoganda. Their research database probably consists of nothing more than a reporter's head shoved up HCI's collective ass.