Abstract
Policymakers have struggled with how to reduce the prevalence of unintentional shootings for decades. Sadly, the people who are affected by unintentional shootings are often minors. In attempts to address this issue, policymakers in a variety of states have passed Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws, aimed at reducing the prevalence of incidents involving a minor obtaining a firearm and unintentionally shooting themselves or someone else. This study explores some demographic and contextual information surrounding such incidents, and examines whether the rates at which these unintentional shootings by minors occur differ across states based on the presence or lack of a CAP law or laws. The data analyzed for this study were drawn from a variety of sources, including the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, the Law Center for Gun Violence Prevention, and the United States Census Bureau. Data on unintentional shootings by minors were collected for all fifty states for the calendar years 2015 and 2016. These data were used to provide descriptive analyses on some demographic and contextual characteristics of these incidents, and a series of t-tests were used to examine whether there was a difference in the rate of unintentional shootings by minors between states with and without at least one CAP law. Analyses of the incident-based data discovered that a majority of both shooters and victims in these incidents were males. The average age of the shooters was 10, while the average age of the victims was one year younger, 9. Handguns were the type of firearm most commonly involved in unintentional shootings by minors. Most incidents occurred within a residence, usually the residence of the victim of the shooting. Approximately a third of the shootings were fatal, while the other two thirds resulted in injury, but not death. Analyses comparing rates of unintentional shootings by minors across states by the presence of a CAP law returned results that failed to reach statistical significance. That is, this study found that states with at least one CAP law do not have statistically different rates of unintentional shootings by minors than states without a CAP law. The study concludes with suggestions as to how future research could further explore the effectiveness of CAP laws at reducing rates of unintentional shootings by minors.