Think having a gun at home makes you safer? You're wrong. | Opinion

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I grew up in the shadow of my grandfather's suicide. It was my mother’s father. He shot himself in 1958 when my mom was 17. 

Despite this ugly tragedy, I don’t hate guns. I actually like shooting them. And I've fired some big ones, like a .357 magnum and an AR-15, starting when I was in Boy Scouts. But I still see firearms in a different way.

That's why when a recent study by the premier medical journal JAMA said nearly 7 million U.S. children, ages 17 years and under, live in homes with at least one unlocked and loaded firearm, I shuddered. 

Part of me says these are 7 million future catastrophes that can’t be avoided because we live in a country with an unrelenting firearms fetish.

But another part of me believes we can help those kids be a lot safer – if we can better understand the reality of gun deaths and take some simple and reasonable precautions.

The facts about guns tell a different story

A long-running cultural narrative says we should rely almost entirely on ourselves for safety. That would seem to mean having a gun in your house is necessary to stop bad guys from hurting you and your family, a message reinforced by the gun lobby and our entertainment industry.

But my grandfather’s gun made nobody safer. And the facts we know about firearms tell a similar story, like that guns are used defensively in only about 1% of personal and property crimes – a lot less frequently than the gun industry has said.

The much more likely way a gun in a home will be used is a suicide, a criminal assault, a criminal homicide or an accidental shooting. Mass shootings thankfully make up only a tiny portion of gun deaths. But they are horrific in an outsized way, and child attackers in school shootings most often acquire guns from the home.

Why guns raise suicide risk

The presence of a gun in the home actually increases the likelihood of a suicide. That’s because firearms are effective. People attempting to kill themselves with guns are 90% successful, while other methods, such as gas poisoning or cutting, range in effectiveness from 57% down to 4%. Hanging and suffocation come close, at 85%. But those happen at less than half the frequency as firearm suicides.

“Effective,” in this case, means finality. No chance for someone to step in and help the person with their mental health problems or address causes of their despair. No chance to save a family from generations of grief.

This means we should be seriously worried about having children in households with unlocked loaded firearms. Especially since we know guns are now the leading cause of death among minors.

So, while I like target shooting, these are the reasons I don’t have a gun in our home, where our 10-year-old and 14-year-old sons live.

It turns out, I’m the minority among my close friends – all of whom are fathers. When I asked why they have firearms, they said it was for protection, which didn’t surprise me, since it’s the most common explanation Americans give for gun ownership. 

What did surprise me was when I learned – only recently – that there was a gun in the home where I grew up.

We can help kids be safer. Gun locks, safes are a start.

My mom told me stories about her father, the talented son of an immigrant who as an engineer patented a gyroscopic navigation device. Scarred by his death, she didn’t want to even look at a gun. And I never saw one in our house. 

But my dad, who is 85 and grew up in Central Florida with people doing daily target practice in their backyards, has now told me he kept a pistol hidden away. When I was 16 and we moved to a rural area, he loaded it and put it in his bottom clothes drawer.

“I felt like I needed it for protection. For us,” he said.

While data shows us that crime is actually down and that having guns doesn’t make us safer, it appears those might be losing arguments in a country where we own the most firearms per capita in the world.

But we can agree to be more careful with the guns we own, especially in homes with children. Gun locks are cheap and often free at local police departments. Or we can use new ways to secure them, like smart guns, smart holsters and smart safes that can’t be activated without biometric input such as fingerprints or blood vessel patterns.

We can talk to people about the dangers of unsecured guns and work to persuade the gun industry to help spread that fact-driven message. New safety technology will, after all, increase their bottom lines. 

And we can also tell the personal stories of what can happen in homes with unsecured guns, when a mistake or moment of despair changes a family forever. Like what happened with mine.

Joel Burgess is a voices editor for USA TODAY Opinion.