Today, Christen McGinnes counsels trauma survivors: “If I can survive, you can.” She’s in a position to say that because she attempted suicide with a gun. In 2009, she got fired from her job, her romantic relationship ended, and her best friend and her grandmother both died. So she tried to kill herself — but today, she’s grateful that she didn’t succeed.

Guns are part of American culture. Today, there are more than 300 million guns in the country. Yet, unlike other consumer products from pill bottles to cars, we haven’t improved the safety of gun technology in the past century. This means far too many tragedies. But there are gun safety innovations in development and ways to make firearms safer that are about investment and ingenuity, manufacturing and commerce, not about political gridlock and threats to Second Amendment rights.

Why This Matters

Each year, around 17,000 people in the U.S. are killed or injured as a result of unintentional shootings or youth suicide – deaths and injuries that could be prevented if firearms were safer.

In the U.S., 89% of unintentional shooting deaths among children happen in the home. These terrible stories — tales of heartbreak and desperation; tales of real guns used as deadly toys — inspire questions like: Is a gun an unsafe thing to have around the house at all?

If a person has a gun in their home, they’re more likely to be hurt with a gun. A home that contains a gun is up to 170% more likely to host a homicide, and its occupants up to 460% more likely to commit suicide.

"Gun violence is often an unintended consequence of gun ownership."

Dr. Garen Wintemute
Director UC Firearm Violence Research Center

The majority of gun deaths in the U.S are suicides; more than 20,000 kill themselves with a gun each year. Many suicides are impulsive acts, committed during a time of vulnerability or heartbreak — and a person who attempts suicide with a gun is far more likely to die than an attempt by any other method. A lot of people who attempt suicide get treatment afterwards and 90% never go on to die from suicide, but that’s not possible if the suicide attempt succeeds. When 82% of youth who commit suicide use a family member’s gun to do so, we are compelled to look at ways to make guns safer and keep them out of the wrong hands.

Our Approach

There are high tech and low tech ways to make guns safer. Some approaches focus on changing the social norms and practices around handling the guns that are already in American homes. Another approach is technology to make guns themselves safer.

From the perspective of changing social norms and practices, many advocates hope to affect how parents think about storing their guns. Parents underestimate the extent to which their children know where their household guns are stored and the frequency with which children handle household guns unsupervised. Changing social norms around gun storage could be compared to “designated driver” campaigns; this phrase may seem ubiquitous now, but it was popularized by several promotional campaigns in the 1980s. For gun safety, how might we understand and begin to change norms, particularly in the 1.4 million households that house both children and an unlocked and loaded firearm?

New approaches to gun safety are trying to shift culture and norms. For example, one recent campaign showed children playing with tampons saying, “If they find it, they’ll play with it. Always lock up your guns.” There’s also the Just Ask campaign, which encourages parents to ask other parents, “Is there an unlocked gun where my child plays?”

Then there’s the guns themselves. Another car-related parallel could be drawn here, specifically to making cars physically safer with air bags and mandatory seatbelts. How might we harness technological advances to make guns safer?

Innovators seeking to develop “smart guns” or “smart accessories” are often trying to build guns that can only be used by a gun’s owner or an approved person, i.e., guns that are “user-authenticated” in the same way that a smartphone requires either your password or your fingerprint to get in. Different solutions need to be available for different audiences. A fingerprint sensor that may work for home security may not work for law enforcement where access is needed in rain and with gloves on, a situation where a proximity device that can unlock the gun is more appropriate (similar to an RFID tag that opens or starts your car).

_{Photo Credit: Biofire}

Smart guns, safes and locks would enable a loaded firearm to be at the ready but not fall into the wrong hands and kill or injure someone. Smart guns can also disrupt the market for stolen guns. Nearly a quarter of one million guns are stolen each year, guns that end up on our streets making our communities less safe. Smart gun technologies would render stolen guns useless as lethal weapons.

There are hurdles to making smart guns feasible for gun owners. Creating demand for smart guns and smart gun accessories is one. Many gun aficionados say they have no interest in buying a gun that they consider to be less functional. Gun owners are also concerned about whether smart guns could be tracked. Mandates requiring only smart guns be sold in a state have backfired with the effect of suppressing new products coming to market. And would a new, safer product encourage people who would otherwise not purchase a gun to become gun owners?

Despite these hurdles, advances in smart gun technology may yet yield advances that could prevent accidents and reduce youth suicide. After all, the tech industry is no stranger to hard problems — or to legal and social attempts to stifle innovation.

RESOURCES

Safer Guns

Why This Matters

Our Approach