Watching a one-minute video on firearm safety can lower the risk that children will touch a gun that they find. That's the major takeaway from a new JAMA Pediatrics study that put kids in a playroom setting and monitored their interaction with hidden, unloaded guns, Yahoo! life reports.
The study included 226 kids between the ages of 8 and 12 who were randomly sorted into two groups. One group saw a one-minute video on gun safety conducted by the police chief at Ohio State University; the other group saw a similar video on car safety.
With their parents' consent, the children were invited to play a week after watching the video in a lab at Ohio State that was disguised as a playroom. The room had a range of toys and games to play with, along with an unlocked file cabinet that contained two disabled 9-millimeter handguns.
Nearly all of the children found the guns, and a disturbing 53% handled the gun. However there were differences in how children reacted to the guns, depending on which video that they saw.
Children who watched the gun safety video were three times more likely to tell an adult that they had found the firearms (34% compared to 11% in the car safety group). They also were less likely to touch them: Nearly 40% of children in the gun safety video group handled the guns, compared to 67% of those in the car safety group.