Safe storage of guns is essential for anyone who owns them—especially those with children in the house. Gun injuries have claimed the lives of more than 2,000 children in recent years, and when children inflict those wounds upon themselves or others, they often use guns found at home. Surveys of gun owners have consistently found that more men say they have guns in their house than women, which has made researchers question whether the women surveyed were aware that their male partners were keeping firearms. Researchers from the University of North Carolina and several other universities gave men and women a quiz.

What the researchers wanted to know: Are women who live in houses where guns are kept aware that the firearms are there?

What they did: The researchers recruited parents who took their children to the emergency room at a North Carolina hospital for nonurgent conditions and gave them a home-safety survey that included questions about gun ownership and safety practices. Participants who said they had firearms at home were phoned about a year and a half later and asked similar questions. This time, however, the researchers asked if they could also contact the person's partner. If participants said yes, the other male or female living in the house (a spouse 91 percent of the time) was also phoned and asked about home safety and gun ownership. In all, the researchers asked 76 pairs about the guns in their house.

What they found: The researchers found that men were much more likely to be the primary owners of the gun and were usually responsible for storing it. When there was a gun in the house, the women were aware of it only 72 percent of the time and men 80 percent of the time.

What it means to you: The most important take-away message from this study is that people living together need to communicate about whether there are guns in the house and how they should be stored, says lead researcher Tamera Coyne-Beasley. She says that women need to pay special attention to gun storage since they are not usually the ones charged with that task. Men, for their part, need to make sure they are telling their partners where and how the guns are stored. At present, firearm safety counseling is likely to be given in health clinics, which are usually attended by mothers. However, the researchers say these clinics may be more effective from a public-health standpoint if they are held in places with heavier concentrations of men, such as home improvement stores or shooting ranges. Gun safety clinic with your ball bearings, fellas?

Caveats: The level of miscommunication between partners may be even worse than this study suggests, since women—who were less likely to know about a gun in the house than men—were more likely to be approached initially because they typically take kids to the emergency room more often than do their male partners.

Find out more: Straight from the horse's mouth, or maybe the gun's barrel, Smith & Wesson's website has safety tips for gun owners.

KidsHealth.org has a website that tells kids what to do if they see a gun.

Read the article: Coyne-Beasley, T., et al. "Do Partners With Children Know About Firearms in Their Home? Evidence of a Gender Gap and Implications for Practitioners." Pediatrics. June 6, 2005, Vol. 115, No. 6, pp. e662-e667.

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