About 7 million kids live in a home with a loaded and unlocked gun, a study finds

A study estimates that 32 million children live in homes with firearms, and a significant portion of those guns are not stored safely. Here, handguns are displayed at Kittery Trading Post, in Kittery, Maine. Charles Krupa/AP hide caption toggle caption Charles Krupa/AP Warning: This story discusses suicide. An estimated 32 million children in the United States live in homes with firearms, nearly 7 million of whom have at least one firearm in the household that's unlocked and loaded. That's according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open . "This study sheds further light on the fact that there are millions of kids living in this country, in households where weapons are readily available and often not locked up," says Dr. Chethan Sathya , a pediatric surgeon and director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health, a health system in New York. "Many of these families don't know the risk of having that gun not being locked up." Since 2020, firearms have been the leading cause of death among children and teens . While a majority of those deaths are due to homicides, a significant percentage are suicides, says Dr. Matthew Miller, a public health researcher at Northeastern University. "When children take their own lives purposefully, in a suicide, the gun almost always comes from their home," says Miller, who is the lead author of the study published Tuesday. …