A 15-minute conversation about firearm storage can more than double the willingness of gun owners to consider keeping their firearms outside the home during a personal crisis, a new study has found.
The research, published in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, was led by the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University. According to Phys.org, the study analyzed data from 232 members of the Mississippi National Guard, all of whom had access to firearms in their homes.
The researchers used a program called Project Safe Guard, a brief intervention designed to encourage secure firearm storage. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group received the Project Safe Guard conversation about firearm storage. The other received a comparison conversation focused on other aspects of health and home safety. Both conversations ran about 15 minutes.
Before and after the conversation, and again at three and six months later, participants were asked about their willingness to temporarily have someone they trust store their firearm if they or a household member became highly distressed.
The results were most striking among participants who started out completely opposed to out-of-home storage. Immediately after the intervention, 56.5 percent of those who received Project Safe Guard reported at least some willingness to consider temporary out-of-home storage. Among those who received the comparison conversation, that figure was 20.8 percent.
Participants who went through Project Safe Guard also became significantly more willing to consider out-of-home storage when they themselves faced high distress. A smaller but still notable increase appeared when participants were asked about storing firearms away from home if someone else in their household became distressed.
The study is grounded in a concern about how firearm access intersects with mental health crises. Research has found that having a firearm readily available can increase suicide risk, particularly during periods of acute distress. Temporarily reducing that access during a crisis is one strategy that public health researchers have proposed, but gun owners have often been reluctant to act on it.
"Many firearm owners are understandably hesitant to consider storing their firearms somewhere else, even when they recognize that a crisis could change how safe it is to have a firearm readily available," said Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers.
The Project Safe Guard intervention was not designed as a single-session treatment but as a brief, low-barrier conversation that could fit into existing health or safety contexts, such as a routine check-in with a National Guard member. The fact that the study was conducted with a military population is significant, as service members face elevated suicide risk compared to the general population and often have strong cultural ties to firearm ownership.
The researchers noted that the data came from the original randomized controlled trial of Project Safe Guard, meaning the study was designed from the start to test whether the intervention worked.
