Law-enforcement equipmentWashington to test police gun safety equipment

Lawmakers in Washington are currently debating legislation that would require police departments to thoroughly test the gun locks and safes they issue to law enforcement officers for use in their homes.

The bill comes as a result of the accidental death of a three-year old son of a Sheriff’s deputy who had gotten ahold of his father’s gun from a department-issued safe.

The family maintains that the safe was faulty, but Ed Owens, the child’s father and a Clark County Sheriff’s deputy, was fired in November after an internal affairs investigation revealed that he had improperly stored the gun and blamed his eleven-year old stepdaughter for his son’s death.

Fighting the charges, Owens has sued the department and called the report “a pack of lies.” He claims that he was fired for opposing the department’s policy of issuing faulty gun safes and refusing to replace them. Owens wants $1 million in damages as well as his job back.

“As an employee you’re told if you have a concern to take it to your boss. I did all of that,” Owens said. “And every effort to get the safes pulled was stonewalled by the administration.”

California is currently the only state that has gun safety device regulations that require outside laboratory testing, and many in Washington are uncertain of the need for a similar law there.

Don Pierce, the executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, questioned the bill especially given the fact that it would cost more than $260,000 a year to implement.

“We’re hard-pressed to support mandating that an expensive gun safe be issued when law enforcement officers have for years safely stored their firearms at home,” Pierce said.

Echoing Pierce, Daniel Davies, the owner of Mary’s Pistols in Tacoma, said he did not see the need for costly regulations when guns already have properly functioning safety devices.

“We’ve already got trigger locks with all handguns,” Davies said. “And now we’ve got to pay someone to test them? Give me a break.”

Rather than have outside labs test gun safes, Pierce recommended that the Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs focus on educating chiefs and sheriffs about the pros and cons of various safety devices and let them decide for themselves.

Meanwhile gun control advocates support the legislation, but note that it is not a priority for them.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, roughly 30,000 people in the United States die each year from guns, but fewer than a thousand are considered to be accidental. The Safety Commission does not track the number of deaths from faulty gun locks and notes that there have been no recalls of any gun safety devices since 2001.

“Child safety locks should accomplish the task for which they’re designed,” said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center.

Currently gun control advocates are focusing their efforts on keeping firearms away from dangerous individuals and emphasizing personalization, explained Jon Vernick, the co-director of the John Hopkins Center for Gun Policy.

Vernick said these measures are likely to save far more lives than gun safes which are only as effective as the person using them.

“The problem with gun locks is that to be effective the user has to remember to always use them to take the gun lock off when using the gun and always remember to put the lock back on,” he said.