Guns are the No. 3 killer of children, after cars and cancer. According to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, keeping a gun locked and unloaded, and locking up the ammunition in a separate place, greatly decrease the risk that children or teenagers will attempt suicide or accidentally injure themselves with the guns. For a separate study published last month in the journal Pediatrics, researchers in Ohio carried out telephone surveys of urban and rural households to find out whether people with children in the house were more careful about firearms.

What the researchers wanted to know: Are people less likely to own guns, or more likely to store them carefully if they do own them, if they have children in the house?

What they did: The survey was carried out in northeastern Ohio, with 238 urban and 284 rural people. Some 1,600 people were actually interviewed, but a third of the respondents had to be left out because they either didn't know if there was a gun in the house or refused to answer some questions. The researchers also dropped everyone who wasn't ages 25 to 44, since people in that age group are the most likely to have children. (Otherwise, the effect of age might have confounded the results, since they'd be comparing 25-year-olds with children to 80-year-olds without children.)

What they found: People with children were a little less likely to have a gun in the house. But of gun owners who had children, only 20 percent kept guns locked or locked up. About the same was true of gun owners without children.

What the study means to you: So few respondents stored their guns in the safest way (locked, unloaded, and separate from ammunition) that the researchers decided to define safety as keeping the gun locked with a trigger lock or in a drawer, safe, or gun cabinet that was locked. Having children in the house didn't seem to influence whether people keep their guns stored safely. In surveys, most people with guns and kids say that their children know not to play with the guns, but other studies have found that even kids who've had gun safety training will handle a firearm if they come across it.

Caveats: Most of the respondents were women, but men are more likely than women to have guns, so gun ownership could actually be higher than this survey suggests.

Find out more: Tips about storing guns, from the University of Washington

Read the article: Connor, S. M. "The Association Between Presence of Children in the Home and Firearm-Ownership and -Storage Practices." Pediatrics. January 2005, Vol. 115, No. 1, pp. e38–e43.

Abstract online: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org