Follow-up Gun Study: Can Safety Videos Mitigate Interest in Guns in Children?

Children will play in an observed room for 20 minutes. Aside from a selection of toys, two real handguns will be placed in a drawer. The handguns have been modified so they cannot fire. Inside the magazine, the handgun contains no bullets. Instead, it contains a sensor that counts the number of times the trigger is pulled with sufficient force to discharge the gun. This allows us to distinguish reliably the children who pull the trigger from those who handle the gun but do not pull the trigger

Children and their parents will be debriefed on the actual purpose of the study, including the role of the safety video and how the movie clips were edited.