On Jan. 22, a 17-year-old boy shot and killed a fellow student before killing himself at a high school in Nashville. It was the first fatal school shooting of the new year; it will almost certainly not be the last. In 2024, the United States saw 39 school shootings.

It doesn’t have to be this way. New national policies regarding secure gun storage could save children’s lives.

As a scientist working to prevent public health crises, I am all too familiar with our social and political failures to embrace simple solutions that could dramatically change seemingly intractable problems. Yet ensuring that all gun-owning households secure their firearms from unauthorized users — including children — could immediately decrease school shootings.

Beyond the horrors resulting from unauthorized access to firearms in school shootings, guns now kill more children in the United States than cancer, car crashes or any other cause. Moreover, the majority of child gun deaths involve perpetrators who are children themselves, who obtained guns from home. Making firearm owners prevent unauthorized access to firearms would have direct impacts on the safety of the nation’s 50 million school-age children.

Only eight states currently have laws explicitly requiring safe storage for guns. And yet, we know that laws to prevent child access to guns significantly reduce unintentional injuries among children, lower youth suicide rates by 13% and result in 17% fewer homicides perpetrated by adolescents. We also know that in half of all cases in which students themselves perpetrate school shootings, their weapons were obtained from homes where the firearms had not been securely stored.

Universal safe storage laws are sometimes criticized by those who say the principles of safe storage are inherent in existing legislation. “Whether it’s a child endangerment statute, a criminal negligence statute or a reckless handling of firearms statute, states already prohibit actual reckless behavior with firearms around children,” states the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action. “The statutes may look different and may not reference firearms explicitly, but the prohibition on reckless conduct involving firearms is clear.”

That’s simply not true. In the absence of actual laws requiring safe storage, weapons are finding their way into the hands of children, often with tragic results.

Fortunately, some states have begun adopting legislation that invests in safer storage. One legislative incentive, in place in Tennessee and under consideration in Wisconsin, is to exempt the purchase of firearm safes from state sales taxes.

While it’s great that some states are moving toward this, it’s still an uphill battle to pass gun sense legislation in many states. But legislation is only one avenue for increasing safe storage. We can treat this as a public health crisis, and have public health funding pay for gun locks, much the way governments funded free COVID tests during the pandemic. Research shows that the widespread distribution of life-saving interventions can be a successful and cost-effective public health strategy.

A basic handgun safe can cost as little as $40. Here in Tennessee, where I live with my family, the cost of supplying secure storage solutions to all 1.5 million homes where children live with firearms would cost about $40 million, or less than $25 per child. This cost would, of course, be considerably less each year going forward as household safe storage needs were met, all the while saving lives. This would be a far-better use of tax dollars than active shooter drills, required by some 40 states, which traumatize students despite almost no evidence of their effectiveness.

Some states, including Georgia and Michigan, have taken a hard line for reckless gun storage after the fact, trying and sentencing parents for the lives lost due to the reckless storage of their firearms. But these after-the-fact measures don’t save lives.

We need a prevention plan we can implement today, and we can’t afford to ignore the data we have in hand. Gun owners and policy makers need to ask themselves whether $40 is a price they’re willing to pay to keep our children safe.

____

Danielle Poole is the director of research at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. She is a Public Voices Fellow of Yale and The OpEd Project. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

___

©2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.