Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, ahead of car crashes and every other cause, according to CDC data tracked by groups like Everytown and Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. That single statistic is the starting point for any real answer to whether it’s safe for teens to have access to guns.
Firearm suicide makes up more than a third of all youth gun deaths and nearly half of youth suicides overall, and for people 18 and under who use a gun in a suicide, 79% used a firearm that belonged to a family member rather than one they acquired independently. Access, not ownership status, is the variable driving most of the risk.
Why Storage Is the Deciding Factor
More than 40% of US households have at least one gun, and despite years of public safety campaigns, a meaningful share of those guns are still kept loaded and unlocked. Research consistently shows that safe storage, unloaded, locked, ammunition stored separately, is one of the few interventions with strong evidence behind it for reducing both suicide and unintentional shootings involving teenagers, regardless of a family’s broader views on gun ownership.
Where the Risk Varies the Most
Firearm death rates among children and teens vary enormously by state: from 2020 to 2024, Washington DC, Mississippi, and Louisiana had the highest rates, at 10.1, 8.7, and 8.4 deaths per 100,000 respectively, while Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York had the lowest, all under 1.2 per 100,000. That gap, roughly eight-fold between the highest and lowest states, reflects real differences in storage laws, access, and enforcement rather than something inherent to any particular region’s population.
The Honest Answer
Whether it’s “safe” for a teenager to have access to a gun depends almost entirely on how that access is structured: an unsecured firearm in a home with a teenager present carries measurably higher risk than the same household with the same gun properly locked and stored separately from ammunition. The data doesn’t support a blanket answer either way, it supports a specific one: storage practices, not the presence of a gun in the house alone, are what the evidence says actually moves the needle on teen firearm deaths.
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