One in four Colorado teens said they could get access to a loaded gun within 24 hours, survey results released Monday showed, with nearly half saying it would even take them less than 10 minutes.
“It’s a lot of access and it’s short periods,” commented Virginia McCarthy, a doctoral candidate at the Colorado School of Public Health and lead author of the research letter describing the findings, published in the medical journal JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Pediatrics.
Native American students in Colorado said they had the easiest access to a loaded gun, with 39%, of which 18% said they could get one within 10 minutes, compared to 12% of all respondents, according to the survey. . Young American Indians and Alaska Natives also have the highest suicide rates.
“Creating barriers to easy access, such as locking firearms and unloaded storage, prolongs the time before someone can act on impulse and increases the likelihood that they will change their mind or someone else will. ‘one intervenes,” Kaiser Health News said in its study report.
The data comes from the Healthy Kids Colorado Study, a survey conducted every two years among a random sample of 41,000 middle and high school students.