Children’s Access to Guns at Home

* After all the murderous horrors of recent years, it would seem a no-brainer that guns should be a no-no in the home of an unhappy, depressed, sullen adolescent. Yet an article last year in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reported that guns were present in the homes of 27% of adolescents undergoing psychotherapy for major depression. Even after repeated warnings by the psychiatrists that guns in the home raised the potential for suicide of these children, over half the families still had their guns two years later. In addition, 12 families who did not have guns at the start had acquired guns.

Following the Santee tragedy, the blame has been cast on inadequate parenting, on media violence, on lack of school incentives, on poor peer relationships, on failure to recognize depression--on almost anything but the presence of guns in the home. It’s as if the public and the squeamish political leaders, inured by a pro-gun president and Congress, have bought lock, stock and smoking barrel into the National Rifle Assn. credo that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” That’s true in the strictest sloganeering sense, but the fact remains that adolescents without guns rarely murder their schoolmates or commit suicide; unhappy adolescents with guns do so. Parents must take full responsibility for removing or at least efficiently locking up all guns in a home in which there lives a difficult adolescent.

BEN SILVERMAN MD

Seal Beach

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“L.A. Panel Hopes to Require Guns That Can Be Fired Only by Owners” (March 11) states that a panel decided the only way to prevent gun homicides by children is to develop special personal guns. This approach neglects the hundreds of millions of guns already in homes and in criminal hands.

Current trigger locks will not be used because they require too much time to take off in an emergency. With all the brains in this country, why not make economical personal safety locks that can be removed instantaneously?

JIM KAWAKAMI

Los Angeles

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Mehammed Mack states, “We must remember his age before anything else,” referring to Charles Andrew Williams (Voices, March 10). I believe that we need to remember those poor kids he (allegedly) blasted with a cold heart from this life, and the pain he inflicted on the people who loved them, before we remember anything else.

ANTONIO HERNANDEZ

Baldwin Park