Detroit City Councilwoman Mary Waters is taking a unique approach to preventing more children from being shot by unsecured guns in the city.
Waters, a former teacher, is going to schools to provide gun locks to children who sign pledge cards promising to deliver the locks to households with unsecured firearms. On Thursday, Waters went to Carleton Elementary School on the city’s east side to talk to students about gun safety and provide gun locks that were distributed by teachers.
“There were so many hands that went up when we talked about guns in homes,” Waters tells Metro Times. “It was pretty clear that some of these kids already know about guns in their homes. And that’s the scary part.”
After a student at suburban Oxford High School killed four people and injured seven in 2021, a Michigan law went into effect in February 2024 that requires gun owners to keep unattended firearms unloaded and locked away if a child is present at the home. But the law isn’t stopping these preventable shootings.
The initiative comes as Detroit sees a troubling rise in accidental shootings involving children. Since September, at least five young children have shot themselves after finding unsecured firearms, including a 3-year-old who critically wounded himself in the face with his mother’s gun.
“Our children know where the guns are,” Waters says. “If adults won’t use locks, I’m asking kids to help me keep them safe.”
The idea behind the pledge cards, Waters says, is to get children to commit to their promise.
“If a child can say, ‘I promise to do that,’ and they do it in writing, it helps them seal the deal,” Water says.
Waters plans to expand the initiative to other schools in Detroit.
“This is about instilling in children what safety really means,” she says. “They can be a voice for themselves, an advocate for their own safety.”
