Friend,
With the holiday season approaching, I’m very excited to go home and see my parents, eat a big Thanksgiving meal, and watch the Macy’s Day Parade — the best part of the Thanksgiving holiday in my opinion.
But being home in Texas also reminds me that my state has among the highest rates of unintentional shootings by children. Gun deaths among Texas teens have more than doubled in a decade.
That’s why today, I want to talk about a lesson that is central to Brady’s mission, a lesson that my dad instilled in me when I was a kid: the importance of secure firearm storage — which means storing guns locked, unloaded, and away from ammunition.
I’m so grateful for my dad’s safety around firearms because it’s more important than ever — especially during the holiday season. Unintentional shootings increase dramatically around the holidays, with two of the highest weeks of unintentional shootings being the weeks around Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve.
We see this spike for a few reasons. People are in closer proximity to unsecured firearms while at home and visiting the homes of friends and family, and often have an increase in alcohol consumption and firearm purchasing. With 4.6 million children living in homes with unlocked and loaded firearms, the potential for tragedies like an unintentional shooting are high.
Kids are curious and will find everything when they are home for the holidays, peeking around the house while their parents cook or searching for presents. In fact, I once found one of my dad’s firearm safes when I was a child because I was looking for my Christmas presents.
The fact that my dad’s gun was locked up ensured that I was safe that day. But if he hadn’t securely stored his guns, I could have become one of the eight kids who are unintentionally shot or injured every day in an incident of family fire — a shooting that results from someone misusing an unsecured firearm from the home.
So, with the holiday season at our doorstep, we should prepare to have frank conversations about secure firearm storage. If just 20 percent of households with firearms practiced safe storage, we could prevent one-third of youth gun suicides and unintentional shooting deaths.
This holiday season, I urge you to follow in my dad’s footsteps and have your own conversations around secure firearm storage, especially before you go over to a friend or relative’s house. If you need help starting this important conversation, check out our tips and how to discuss firearm safety around the holidays.
