In the space of a month late this summer, Utah saw three cases of small children getting hold of a firearm and shooting themselves. In two of those cases, the child died.
State Rep. Matt MacPherson said that after those shootings, he “couldn’t help but think about” a bill he proposed in the Utah Legislature several months earlier — one that would have offered a tax incentive to people who buy safety devices for their firearms.
While MacPherson, a Republican who represents part of Salt Lake County’s west side, said “there’s no way of knowing if” safety devices would have prevented those deaths and injuries, such a bill could “help mitigate more of these types of accidents.”
The final version of the bill, HB326, aimed to give Utahns a tax credit of up to $50 for a device with a deactivating mechanism or a locking storage system — like a firearm safe, cable lock or lock box — and was limited to one per household. The proposed credit started at $300, before being whittled down amid budget constraints.
HB326 passed the Utah House last session but was blocked by the Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee, whose members voted 3-2 to hold it.
While lawmakers passed on this year’s effort, MacPherson said he plans to run the bill again in the 2025 legislative session in hopes of preventing future tragedies like the accidental shootings of this summer.
“When it comes to … suicide prevention, crime, firearm safety, it’s something that we need to talk about,” MacPherson told the committee in February. “The only real ways, legislatively, we can deal with this is [to] encourage it.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salesman Michael Dunn secures a cable gun lock on a handgun at the gun shop Gunnies in Orem on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024.
‘Getting worse and worse’
This summer in Utah, three accidental shootings happened within a month:
• On Aug. 2, a 3-year-old boy in Magna picked up a gun that had fallen from a broken shelf and then shot himself in the foot and survived. His mother was later charged with aggravated child abuse, a third-degree felony.
• On Aug. 22, in Santaquin, a 5-year-old boy died after he found a 9mm handgun in a back room of his family’s home and fired one round. Police said he died at the scene.
• On Sept. 2, an 8-year-old boy was in a car parked at a convenience store in Lehi when he found a handgun and fired it at his own head. The boy died in a nearby hospital a few hours later.
Although incidents like Aug. 22′s “tragic accident” are “uncommon,” Lt. Mike Wall of the Santaquin police said, firearms are “still dangerous, no matter how they’re stored.”
Since 2015, more than 30 unintentional shootings by children have occurred in Utah, according to the #NotAnAccident Index, a tracker run by the gun-safety advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. The organization’s database has tracked 2,800 national incidents in that time; in 2024, as of Sept. 20, there have been 179 accidental shootings by children nationwide, resulting in 63 deaths and 118 injuries.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also keeps a tally of unintentional shootings by children — in statistics published last year, it identified 1,262 unintentional firearm injury deaths among children 17 years old and younger between 2003 and 2021. Accidents, according to the CDC, are the leading cause of death for children between 1 and 14 years old.
Jaden Christensen, leader of the Utah chapter of Moms Demand Action (a subsidiary of Everytown for Gun Safety), said secure storage and keeping firearms “as far away from a child’s reach” is the best preventive measure for unintentional gun deaths. He added that education and state incentives are also needed.
“Parents across Utah worry for the safety of their kids at the mall, movie theaters and schools, yet ignoring the risks at home by leaving guns accessible for their children,” Christensen said in a statement to the chapter’s website. “Our state has a key role in educating and passing gun safety laws to ensure parents keep their guns securely stored.”
Christensen, who works as an emergency room nurse, said he has noticed a visible increase in pediatric shooting cases.
“It has been continuously getting worse and worse over the past couple of years,” he said. “Guns are only getting more strong, and bullets are getting more deadly. So we’re just seeing more damning effects from gunshot wounds.”
Utah is one of 24 states that doesn’t have child access and secure storage laws, even as the majority of Utahns support some kind of gun safety measures, as seen in a 2021 Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll.
According to Everytown research, households practicing secure gun storage see 85% fewer gun accidents than those that don’t.
MacPherson’s bill worked to revive past legislative efforts to encourage locking up firearms.
In 2019, the Legislature put half a million dollars toward firearm safety measures, including creating a brochure and education program and creating a redeemable coupon program for gun safe purchases. The funding was part of HB17, a bill largely focused on suicide prevention.
A spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services said the agency used the money to give 1,388 people rebates of up to $100.
Two years later, the Legislature pivoted in HB60 to funding that suicide prevention account with a portion of the revenue the state collects from concealed carry permit fees. The 2021 law also allows Utahns to carry a firearm without a permit.
Since, DHHS says, it has provided:
• 4,267 people rebates of up to $200 in 2022.
• 2,084 safes and 3,933 ammo boxes in 2023.
• 1,481 safes and 1,440 ammo boxes in 2024.
DHHS, in an email to The Tribune, attributed decreased gun safety device distributions to drops in revenue from concealed carry permit fees.
Utah Code 76-10-524 is the state’s sole gun law related to securing firearms. Established through HB17, the code requires gun dealers to distribute cable-style locks to anyone purchasing a firearm.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salesman Michael Dunn prepares to install a cable gun lock on a handgun at the gun shop Gunnies in Orem on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024.
Objections to the tax credit
When MacPherson’s bill came up this year, a committee member and a tax policy group objected to it.
Sen. Curtis Bramble, R-Provo, the only committee member to question MacPherson, asked if a $100,000 vehicle would qualify for the tax incentive if it contained a locked glove box.
“The reason I use a facetious example … is the idea that statutes can be twisted to unintended consequences. Some would call that fraud,” Bramble said. “Without having a tight definition, I’m curious what really fits the definition of a storage device for a firearm.”
Rusty Cannon, then president of the Utah Taxpayers Association, also opposed the tax credit: “The tax base should not be used as a Christmas tree to hand out gifts to what might be politically popular … If we passed all tax-credit bills like this, eventually we won’t have a tax base.”
Bramble added: “I share the concerns of the Taxpayers Association. … We worked hard to have a modified flat tax.”
The association’s current president, Billy Hesterman, said in an email to The Tribune that the decision to oppose the bill “was solely based on what is good tax policy.” Good policy, he said, will broaden the tax base and lower the tax rate.
Among the 26 states with gun laws addressing child firearm access in the home are Texas and Florida — states whose legislatures are also controlled by Republican majorities. In Texas, a person is criminally negligent if a child under 17 obtains an unsecured and readily dischargeable firearm. Florida has enacted a similar statute for children under 16.
In Virginia, GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a 2023 bipartisan bill for a $300 tax credit for the purchase of gun safes. The next year, the credit was expanded to include trigger locks.
According to Everytown’s figures from 2013 to 2022, an average of 423 Utahns were killed by guns each year — with 351 of those annual deaths, or 83%, by suicide. While people may believe “they hear too much” about gun violence, Christensen said, they are “hearing less than 1% of what is happening.”
Gun violence, Christensen said, “is impacting everybody. … It will impact you. … We need to be more preventative than reactive.”
In his September news conference on PBS Utah, Cox pleaded with Utahns to lock up their guns and said his office would “look closely” at legislation to encourage that.
“The deaths there, those family members are devastated by that, and I can tell you that’s far worse for them than any law could ever impose or imagine,” Cox told reporters Sept. 19. “I’m a firm believer in the Second Amendment and protecting our Second Amendment rights and doing so safely, and so I would have to look at the proposal [and] what that means. … We should absolutely be doing more to make sure people are locking up their weapons.”
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