One in 4 Colorado teens reported they could get access to a loaded gun within 24 hours, according to published Monday. Nearly half of those teens said it would take them less than 10 minutes.

“That’s a lot of access and those are short periods of time,” said , a doctoral candidate at the Colorado School of Public Health and the lead author of the research letter describing the findings in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The results come as Coloradans are reeling from yet another . On March 22, a 17-year-old student shot and wounded two school administrators at East High School in Denver. Police later found his body in the mountains west of Denver in Park County and confirmed he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Another East High student was in February while sitting in his car outside the school.

The time it takes to access a gun matters, McCarthy said, particularly for suicide attempts, which are often impulsive decisions for teens. In research studying people who have attempted suicide, nearly half said the time between ideation and action was less than 10 minutes. Creating barriers to easy access, such as locking up guns and storing them unloaded, extends the time before someone can act on an impulse, and increases the likelihood that they will change their mind or that someone will intervene.

“The hope is to understand access in such a way that we can increase that time and keep kids as safe as possible,” McCarthy said.

The data McCarthy used comes from the Healthy Kids Colorado Study, a survey conducted every two years with a random sampling of 41,000 students in middle and high school. The 2021 survey asked, “How long would it take you to get and be ready to fire a loaded gun without a parent’s permission?”

American Indian students in Colorado reported the greatest access to a loaded gun, at 39%, including 18% saying they could get one within 10 minutes, compared with 12% of everybody surveyed. American Indian and Native Alaskan youths also have the highest rates of suicide.

Nearly 40% of students in rural areas reported having access to firearms, compared with 29% of city residents.

The findings were released at a particularly tense moment in youth gun violence in Colorado. Earlier this month, hundreds of students left their classrooms and walked nearly 2 miles to the state Capitol to advocate for gun legislation and safer schools. The students returned to confront lawmakers again last week in the aftermath of the March 22 high school shooting.

The state legislature is considering a handful of bills to prevent gun violence, including raising the minimum age to purchase or possess a gun to 21; establishing a three-day waiting period for gun purchases; limiting legal protections for gun manufacturers and sellers; and expanding the pool of who can file for extreme risk protection orders to have guns removed from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms became the of death among those ages 19 or younger in 2020, supplanting motor vehicle deaths. And firearm deaths among children increased during the pandemic, with an average of seven children a day dying because of a firearm incident in 2021.

Colorado has endured a string of school shootings over the past 25 years, including at Columbine High School in 1999, Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Arapahoe High School in 2013, and the STEM School Highlands Ranch in 2019.

Teens particularly vulnerable

Although school shootings receive more attention, the majority of teen gun deaths are suicides.

“Youth suicide is starting to become a bigger problem than it ever has been,” said , a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

“Part of that has to do with the fact that there’s more and more guns that are accessible to youth.”

While gun ownership poses a higher risk of suicide among all age groups, teens are particularly vulnerable, because their brains typically are still developing impulse control.

“A teen may be bright and know how to properly handle a firearm, but that same teen in a moment of desperation may act impulsively without thinking through the consequences,” said , a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “The decision-making centers of the brain are not fully online until adulthood.”

Previous research has shown a disconnect between parents and their children about access to guns in their homes. A 2021 study who own firearms said their children could not get their hands on the guns kept at home. But 41% of kids from those same families said they could get to those guns within two hours.

“Making the guns inaccessible doesn’t just mean locking them. It means making sure the kid doesn’t know where the keys are or can’t guess the combination,” said , a senior researcher at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “Parents can forget how easily their kids can guess the combination or watch them input the numbers or notice where the keys are kept.”

If teens have their own guns for hunting or sport, those, too, should be kept under parental control when the guns are not actively being used, she said.

The Colorado researchers now plan to dig further to find out where teens are accessing guns in hopes of tailoring prevention strategies to different groups of students.

“Contextualizing these data a little bit further will help us better understand types of education and prevention that can be done,” McCarthy said.

This originally appeared at .

(Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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OKLAHOMA CITY — By the summer of 2021, Phil Maytubby, deputy CEO of the health department here, was concerned to see the numbers of people getting vaccinated against covid-19 slipping after an initially robust response. With doubt, fear, and misinformation running rampant nationwide — both online and offline — he knew the agency needed to rethink its messaging strategy.

So, the health department conducted something called an online “sentiment search,” which gauges how certain words are perceived on social media. The tool found that many people in Oklahoma City didn’t like the word “vaccinate” — a term featured prominently in the health department’s marketing campaign.

“If you don’t know how your message is resonating with the public,” Maytubby said, “you’re shooting in the dark.”

Across the country, health officials have been trying to combat misinformation and restore trust within their communities these past few years, a period when many people in their state and local health departments. Agencies are using Twitter, for example, to appeal to niche audiences, such as and . They’re collaborating with influencers and celebrities such as and to extend their reach.

Some of these efforts have paid off. By now, of U.S. residents have received at least one shot of a covid vaccine.

But data suggests that the skepticism and misinformation surrounding covid vaccines now threatens other public health priorities. Flu vaccine coverage among children in mid-December was about the same as December 2021, but it was 3.7 percentage points lower compared with late 2020, according to the . The decrease in flu vaccination coverage among pregnant women was even more dramatic over the last two years: 18 percentage points lower.

Other common childhood vaccination rates are down, too, compared with . Nationally, 35% of all American parents oppose requiring children to be vaccinated for measles, mumps, and rubella before entering school, up from 23% in 2019, according to a released Dec. 16. Suspicion swirling around once-trusted vaccines, as well as fatigue from so many shots, is likely to blame.

Part of the problem comes down to a lack of investment that eroded the public health system before the pandemic began. An found local health department spending dropped by 18% per capita between 2010 and 2020. State and local health agencies also lost nearly 40,000 jobs between the 2008 recession and the emergence of the pandemic.

This made their response to a once-in-a-century public health crisis challenging and often inadequate. For example, during covid’s early days, many local health departments to report covid case counts.

“We were not as flexible as we are now,” said , director of public health at the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

At the start of the pandemic, Traxler said, only two people worked on the media relations and public outreach team at South Carolina’s health department. Now, the team has eight.

The agency has changed its communication strategies in other ways, too. Last year was the first year, for example, that South Carolina published data on flu vaccinations every two weeks, with the goal of raising awareness about the effectiveness of the shots. In South Carolina, of adults and children eligible for a flu shot had been vaccinated by early December, even as flu cases and hospitalizations climbed. The flu vaccine rate across all age groups in the U.S. was 51.4% last season.

Those who have opted out of both the covid and flu shots seem to be correlated, Traxler said.

“We’re really just trying to dispel misinformation that’s out there,” Traxler said. To that end, the health department has partnered with local leaders and groups to encourage vaccinations. Agency staffers have also become more comfortable talking to the press, she said, to better communicate with the public.

But some that agencies are still failing on messaging. Scientific words such as “mRNA technology,” “bivalent vaccine,” and “monoclonal antibodies” are used a lot in public health even though many people find them difficult to understand.

A study published by found that covid-related language used by state-level agencies was often more complex than an eighth-grade reading level and harder to understand than the language commonly used by the CDC.

“We have to communicate complex ideas to the public, and this is where we fail,” said , CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, a charitable group focused on strengthening public health. “We have to own the fact that our communication missteps created the environment where disinformation flourished.”

Most Americans support public health, Castrucci said. At the same time, a small but vocal minority pushes an anti-science agenda and has been effective in sowing seeds of distrust, he said.

The more than 3,000 public health departments nationwide stand to benefit from a unified message, he said. In late 2020, the foundation, working with other public health groups, established the to amplify easy-to-understand information about vaccines.

“The good guys need to be just as well organized as those who seek to do harm to the nation,” he said. “One would think we would learn from this.”

Meanwhile, published in October by the Pew Research Center found 57% of U.S. adults believe “false and misleading information about the coronavirus and vaccines has contributed a lot to problems the country” has faced amid the pandemic.

“I was leery like everyone else,” said Davie Baker, 61, an Oklahoma City woman who owns a business that sells window treatments. When the shots became widely available in 2021, she thought they had been developed too quickly, and she worried about some of the things she’d read online about side effects. A pharmacist at Sam’s Club changed her mind.

“She just kind of educated me on what the shot was really about,” Baker said. “She cleared up some things for me.”

Baker signed up for her first covid shot in May 2021, around the same time the health department in Oklahoma City noticed the number of vaccines administered daily was starting to decline.

The department updated its marketing campaign in early 2022. Instead of using the word “vaccinate” to encourage more people to get their covid shots — the term the agency’s social media analytics revealed people didn’t like — the new campaign urged people to “Choose Today!”

“People don’t trust like they used to,” Maytubby said. “They want to make up their own minds and make their own decisions.” The word “choose” acknowledged this preference, he said.

Maytubby thinks the “Choose Today!” campaign worked. A survey of 502 adults in Oklahoma City conducted during the first half of 2022 found fewer than 20% of respondents reacted negatively or very negatively to a sample of “Choose Today!” advertisements. And an estimated have received at least one dose of a covid vaccine — a rate higher than the state average of about 73%.

Other factors are likely at play that have helped bolster Oklahoma City’s vaccine numbers. In the same survey of Oklahoma City adults, some people who were recently vaccinated said family members or church leaders urged them to get the vaccine, or they knew someone who had died from covid. One person said money was the motivation — they received $900 from their employer for getting the covid vaccine.

Meanwhile, the war against misinformation and disinformation wages on. Childhood vaccination rates for the immunizations students typically need to enter kindergarten are down 4.5% in Oklahoma County since the 2017-18 academic year as parents increasingly seek exemptions to the requirements.

That worries Maytubby. He said the primary tactic among those trying to sow distrust about vaccinations has been to cast doubt — about everything from the science to their safety.

“In that aspect, they’ve been pretty successful,” Maytubby said. “Misinformation has changed everything.”

(Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.