Families asked to talk about dementia and guns discuss the thermostat instead, study finds
Public health researchers studying firearm safety for older gun owners with early dementia have hit an unexpected wall: room temperature.
The thermostat is now the most talked-about object in the American home. That is the main result of my study. It is not the result we wanted.
We set out to learn how families talk about guns when an older relative starts showing early signs of dementia. Public health experts have been looking for ways to make that talk easier. We gave three families a quiet room, a pot of coffee and one question.
Within three minutes, all three families were discussing the thermostat. The first argued over whether sixty-eight degrees counts as a reasonable setting. The second brought up a thermostat from a house they sold in 1994, and two cousins left the room. The third family's home has no thermostat. They talked about it anyway. A daughter called it "the elephant in the hallway." She meant the thermostat. We checked.
We did get one useful finding. Every family agreed that a locked safe, or a trusted relative holding the guns for a while, made sense. This took nine seconds. Nobody said it twice.
"Our control group was told to talk only about the thermostat," I said. "They talked about the guns. We do not know what that means. Neither do they."
Our next study will ask families about the thermostat on purpose. We expect a breakthrough on firearms by Friday.
