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“When children have access to guns, unbearably bad things will happen,” says Matt Miller, whose research focuses on firearm violence.
The Georgia high school shooting that claimed four lives this week shows the risks of keeping guns in the home, says Matt Miller, a Northeastern University professor whose research focuses on firearm violence.
Miller has published studies revealing that access to guns is responsible for an increased risk of suicide in addition to mass public shootings like the tragedy Wednesday in Georgia, where a 54-year-old father has been charged with providing the military-style assault rifle that his 14-year-old son allegedly used in the shootings at Apalachee High School.
“This keeps happening in the United States at rates that are outrageously higher than in other developed countries,” says Miller, a Northeastern professor of health sciences and epidemiology. “It keeps happening here because guns — including the kind of AR-15-style rifles that were responsible for this latest attack — are so easy to get a hold of, not only for adults but also for many children.”
Colt Gray, a freshman at the school, is charged with killing two 14-year-old students and two teachers. Gray received the military-style rifle as a Christmas present from his father in 2023, three law enforcement officials told the New York Times. On Thursday, the father, Colin Gray, 54, was arrested and charged with murder and manslaughter for providing his son with access to the weapon despite knowing that Colt Gray was “a threat to himself and others,” according to arrest warrants. The father and son appeared in court together Friday.
Miller referenced a similar case in Michigan, where in 2021 a 15-year-old killed four students at Oxford High School with a handgun that was accessible to him in his home. In April his parents were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for not securing the gun and not responding to their son’s mental health issues, becoming the first parents to be convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting.
“A gun in the home is meant to protect its owner and family but it is more likely to imperil them,” Miller says. “Until people realize that risk — and act on it by removing guns from their homes, or at least doing a lot more to make it very difficult for unauthorized persons to gain access to their firearms — these horrific events are going to continue to happen in this country at rates that are tragically higher than in other developed countries.”
Miller and Harvard’s Deborah Azrael contributed to a study by Carmen Salhi, a Northeastern assistant professor of health sciences, in which one-third of adolescents in a nationally representative survey said they could gain access in less than five minutes to a loaded firearm kept in the home, and half could gain access in 60 minutes or less.
These revelations challenged the view of 70% of parents in the survey who believed their children could not access guns kept in their homes.
“It was shocking to see that half of the children in homes with guns reported being able to get to a loaded gun in under an hour,” Salhi said in a 2021 interview with Northeastern Global News in reference to another key finding of his study. “The number of adolescents who have ready access to a gun in the home is startling to see, and that points to this being a public health issue.”Miller’s research on the relationship between access to household firearms and suicide has shown that people who own a handgun are almost four times more likely to die by suicide than those who don’t have guns — and that storing guns safely could help save the lives of hundreds of children annually.
“The leading cause of firearm deaths in this country is suicide — not homicide, and certainly not mass public homicide like the tragic event in Georgia,” Miller says. “There is overwhelming evidence that suicide rates are many times higher for people who live in homes with guns compared to their neighbors who live in homes without guns.”
Miller says his findings can be applied to people who are vulnerable to committing violence against others, as was the case this week in Georgia.
“Locking guns is certainly better than not locking them,” Miller says. “But the key is not whether a gun is locked or whether it’s loaded. What matters is access — whether a child can gain access. Efforts need to focus on helping parents ensure that children, especially teenagers, cannot get a hold of household firearms.”
Miller notes that children may be able to find the key that unlocks a gun cabinet, or they may be able to guess the password that opens a combination lock.
“Parents care about their kids and what their kids do, so it’s not as though the only way to motivate parents to make their homes safer for their children is to pass legislation, though that can only help,” Miller says.
“In addition to whatever efforts can be made to get parents to realize that they have a responsibility in the eyes of the law to make their guns inaccessible to their children,” adds Miller, “at least as much effort and resources need to be devoted to helping parents understand that suicide and lethal outbursts like this latest tragedy are impossible to predict — and because of this unpredictability that it is incumbent on them to assume the worst could happen and [therefore] make their guns completely inaccessible to children in their home.”
The Apalachee High shooting was the deadliest school shooting this year and the ninth mass killing at a K-12 school in the U.S. since 2006, according to Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox. Another eight students and one teacher are expected to survive their injuries.
Colt Gray is being charged with murder as an adult. Gray had been questioned last year about online threats to commit a school shooting but there had been no probable cause for arrest, according to the FBI’s Atlanta office and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.
“When children have access to guns, unbearably bad things will happen,” Miller says.