ABSTRACT
An important goal for human factors professionals and others interested generally with safety of handguns is to restrict access to them, especially for young children, teens, or mentally handicapped persons. One of the most effective ways to prevent unintentional shootings of and by children is to deny unauthorized access to handguns (Teret & Culross, 2002). In this chapter, there is an emphasis on the protection of young people; however, security measures to protect young persons from inadvertent shootings apply to adult safety as well. It is obvious that no one, young or old, desires to be involved in an inadvertent shooting-either as the victim or the weapon holder. We describe the current devices to safeguard handgun use and explore some of the new technology under development, which potentially can be used for this purpose.
