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Melissa Burch is a Bangor-area pediatrician and board member of the Maine chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
To reach a suicide prevention hotline, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
For pediatricians, working with depressed kids is one of the toughest parts of our jobs. I want to share one particularly difficult case from a few years ago. A teenager was having worsening depression. He was not actively suicidal on that day, but had at times had thoughts of taking his own life. He told me he knew where unlocked firearms and ammunition were kept at his parent’s home. I arranged for urgent counseling and close follow up. When I reached out to the parent, however, they did not feel my concerns justified securing the firearms in the home.
Fortunately, when this young man became acutely suicidal a few weeks later he got the emergency intervention he needed before tragedy struck. Only then did the parent secure the firearms. This could have turned out very differently.
And when parents have concerns about their child’s mental health, their own efforts may not be enough. If this teen had gone to a friend’s home with unlocked guns and ammunition, his own parent’s concerns might not have mattered.
Current Maine law has weak requirements for safe storage, affecting only those owners whose insecure storage results in actual access by children under 16. LD 1120, An Act to Promote the Safe Storage of Firearms, will set reasonable guidelines for safe gun storage.
Every clinic day for the last 25 years I have talked with parents about the “childproofing” needed for homes with young kids. Thankfully, as part of this childproofing, most families with young children or toddlers secure any weapons in the home in a gun safe or lock box. This is an easy conversation to have. The biggest gun safety risk, however, isn’t in homes with toddlers — though horrific instances of young children finding loaded guns do exist. The biggest risk is with teenagers, like the young man I discussed above.
Parents of teens may be less open to the safe storage conversation with the pediatrician. Your children may be very educated in gun safety and may be avid hunters. It can be hard to contemplate suicide risk in your own home. But youth suicide affects an average of 28 Maine families every year and more than 50 percent of these suicide deaths involve firearms. One in five Maine high school students seriously consider suicide. Given that teens may contemplate suicide for minutes, not days, before taking action, we can save the lives of Maine youth by passing LD 1120.
Secure storage isn’t just about safety in the home — it’s also about keeping Maine’s schools safe.
Easy access to unsecured firearms is one of the most significant factors not just in teen suicide but also school shootings. The majority of school shooters are teenagers themselves — usually teenage boys. Teens cannot purchase guns, and too often when these tragedies happen, we hear that they acquired the guns at home. In fact, between 70 percent and 90 percent of firearms used by minors in both suicides and school shootings are found in the child’s home or the home of a relative, having been left easily accessible to those kids.
Even if you are sure this could never happen to you — or you don’t have a firearm in the home — you can’t always know that families your kid visits practice responsible gun storage. We can prevent inevitable moments of crisis from becoming lifelong tragedies for Maine families by requiring guns to be securely stored in all homes that have children and teens, and by getting help for our at-risk teens, rather than giving them easy access to deadly weapons.
To protect our kids — and youth across Maine — legislators in Augusta must pass this common-sense secure storage law. With the support of the Maine chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, I ask you to please reach out to your legislator and urge them to support LD 1120.
