Keeping guns locked and unloaded and locking ammunition in a separate container appear to deter many suicidal teens from acting on their impulses and to prevent unintentional firearm injuries, according to new findings released Tuesday.

U.S. investigators found that people who stored guns unloaded were 70 percent less likely to have teens or small children use the gun on themselves or others. Locking guns, separating them from ammunition or locking up ammunition also offered roughly equal protection for kids and teens, the authors report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Study author Dr. David C. Grossman explained that this is the first study to provide real numbers for how effective these safe storage practices can be in preventing injuries among young people. “There has been no scientific evidence to date on the effectiveness of these measures,” he told Reuters Health.

Grossman, who is based at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, said that gun owners do not need to use all of these precautions to protect teens -simply locking guns or storing them unloaded, for instance, appears to be sufficient. “Gun owners need only take one of these precautions,” he said.

There are also devices on the market - such as a lockbox - that enable gun owners to store guns securely but to also access them in moments, by pressing a couple of keys, Grossman explained. This addresses one “major obstacle” - the concern that safety precautions might prevent gun owners from having quick access to their guns in case of a threat, he said.

During the study, Grossman and his team reviewed how guns were stored in 106 incidents in which young children or teenagers shot themselves intentionally or accidentally shot themselves or someone else. The authors also contacted 480 other gun owners who had never experienced a similar event, and asked them how they kept their guns.

They found that guns used by teens and young children were 70 percent less likely to be stored unloaded, and 73 percent less likely to be locked up. The guns that young people got hold of were also 55 percent less likely to have been kept separately from ammunition, and even less likely to have ammunition that was locked away.

Grossman said he hopes these findings will make gun owners more likely to safely store their guns, adding that even one precaution results in a “far, far less” risk of suicide.

Even though many teenagers can probably figure out how to unlock or load an unloaded gun, such simple precautions often deter suicide because teenagers are a generally impulsive group, Grossman said. Unlike adults, teenagers may become overwhelmed by the need to commit suicide, but those feelings can pass in one hour, he said.

In an accompanying editorial, Drs. Thomas B. Cole of JAMA and Renee M. Johnson of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston note that in 2002 alone, more than 1,000 U.S. teens and children used a gun to commit suicide. This study “strongly suggests” that storing guns safely reduces this risk.

However, “experience suggests that persuading gun-owning families to store their firearms safely is not an easy task,” Cole and Johnson add.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, February 9, 2005.