Texas rarely prosecutes people who fail to secure their guns from children, according to a newspaper review of Department of Public Safety statistics.
Gun owners can be charged with a misdemeanor in Texas if they fail to secure their firearms or leave them in a place that a child can access. But the child access prevention, or CAP, law is rarely applied in Texas, the Austin American-Statesman reported Friday.
Authorities have arrested more than 200 people accused of making a firearm accessible to a child since 1995, when that section of the Texas penal code was enacted, but there have been only 61 convictions, DPS figures show.
Jon Vernick, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University, said studies show CAP laws are linked to fewer accidental deaths among children and even fewer suicides among teens.
"Good research demonstrates that these laws save lives," he said.
Florida was the first state to pass a CAP law in 1989, which paved a way to prosecute gun owners if unsupervised children got hold of a firearm and shot themselves or someone else.
A study that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1997 found that storage laws appeared to prevent unintentional shooting deaths among children younger than 15.
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In Harris County, three children were involved in unintentional shootings over four days. After the third shooting March 2, in which a 6-year-old boy was shot by his brother, Sheriff Adrian Garcia hours later held a news conference and promised a serious push to give away gun locks and preach gun safety at every public meeting.
Nationally, the total number of unintentional gun deaths has fallen significantly over the last 25 years, Vernick said.
