A red button near the ginger hole of a gun controls the black trigger

Critics link lax gun storage to accidental shootings involving youth, mostly in the South

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After running toward the sound of a gunshot that still haunts her, Marentha Sargent watched her 14-year-old, Adrienne Lambert, bleeding from the chest as she collapsed. Moments earlier, the 14-year-old son of Gene Roessler, Sargent’s friend, had ejected the magazine from Roessler’s gun, pointed its barrel at Adrienne and pulled the trigger. The boy didn’t realize, according to police records, there was a bullet in the chamber of his father’s handgun, which he’d grabbed from the kitchen table of their suburban Houston home while the adults were in the garage watching football on TV.

rural youth and handguns: Boy with sound-muffling head phones holds and shoots a rifle at a range.

Study: As young as 12, some rural youth regularly carry handguns

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About 25% of rural youth in a University of Washington analysis said they were as young as 12 when they began carrying handguns and 20% of the roughly 2,000 rural youth and young adults studied carried a handgun at least 40 times during the last 12 months that they self-reported that activity, according to research published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

California Partnerships Helping Reduce Gun Violence, Incarceration

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California has comprehensively strengthened its gun safety laws over the past 25 years and is now generally considered to have the strongest gun safety laws in the nation. Giffords Law Center, which evaluates the strength of state gun laws, affords California the top rank on its Annual Gun Law Scorecard. These legislative changes have been associated with significant declines in overall gun deaths and homicides at the state level.

Gun Safety Can, Should Be Everyone’s Personal Mission

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Conversations about firearms have been historically entrenched in political debate with little regard for gun safety, a life-saving, nonpartisan issue. There’s a serious and immediate need for effective strategies to reduce all forms of gun violence, including mass shootings, “urban gun violence,” suicide and unintentional child shootings.

Atlanta Expert Says ‘Great Gun Divide’ Can Suffocate Safety Lessons

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Guns are everywhere you think they’re not. Guns have been found on the floor of a movie theater and in the diaper aisle of a big box retailer. They aren’t just slid under a mattress at home or tossed up to the top shelf of a closet; they’re lying in a pile of leaves, or behind a toilet in an airport.

Gun Violence in South Outpaces Other Regions For Many Reasons

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The mother left and two teens were alone in the house. It took the 13-year-old son 10 minutes to find the gun. It was loaded and in a bottom dresser drawer covered by one piece of clothing. It might as well have been on the fireplace mantle.