The reason most of us have a gun is to protect ourselves and our loved ones… and maybe even strangers if need be. There’s also the fact that guns are cool as hell, of course, but we have them primarily because we want to protect our families and, by extension, ourselves.
So-called safe storage laws exist ostensibly for safety reasons, but we tend to object to them for a few reasons, up to and including the fact that they make it harder to act in self-defense should the firearm be needed.
This matters today because, well, a new study looks at how many guns are stored “safely.”
According to the study presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics 2026 National Conference and Exhibition in San Diego on Friday, “About 44% of parents of young children who own firearms reported that they own both a handgun and a long gun, at least one of which is not stored securely.”
That’s an alarming number, to be sure, but guess how they define a safely stored firearm? “Storage was classified as secure if all household firearms were stored both locked and unloaded, and not secure if any firearm was stored loaded, unlocked, or both,” the press release announcing the findings said.
Now, all guns being stored is fair. Locked is fair. Unloaded might be fair. Requiring all guns to be locked away and unloaded means they’re not available for self-defense purposes should the need arise.
Real life isn’t like an action movie. The bad guys aren’t known for giving you a chance to load your firearm, rack the slide if it’s a semi-auto, and then come into your bedroom to kill you and violate your spouse in unspeakable ways.
What’s worse is that the researchers seem to understand why people have guns.
The authors observe that firearm injuries are the leading cause of death among children in the United States, and the rates of unintentional firearm injury are increasing among young children. Given that most parents owned handguns and reported protection as their primary motivation for firearm ownership, they conclude there is a need for messaging that addresses the needs and concerns of these groups.
The problem is that they used such a stark-raving-mad definition of “safely stored” that I’m amazed that so many people met it.
Messaging isn’t the problem here. You can tell me until you’re blue in the face, using any method you want, that I need to lock my guns up unloaded, so that I’ll waste precious seconds in an emergency accessing them, but there’s no combination of words possible that will change my mind.
My unused guns are securely stored. Some of them are, in fact, unloaded.
The ones I count on saving my life, though? They’re not. They’re loaded, and while they’re secured, they’re not kept locked up because they’re always within arm’s reach. That’s “in use” in my book, though luckily, Georgia doesn’t require me to justify such things.
And the American Academy of Pediatrics can try to force that, but I hope that in medical school, they had an intensive course on how to pound sand, because it’s not freaking happening.
If you want people to do something, the first step is to make it sensible and not the fever dream of an anti-gunner.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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