The Children's Firearm Tracing Act of 1999 Expands the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative and creates a grant program for local law enforcement agencies for the tracing of guns used in juvenile crime. By law, the Consumer Product Safety Commission is prohibited from regulating the safety of firearms. As a result, guns often lack safety features designed to prevent unintentional shootings by children. Every year, many children are fatally injured when a child finds a loaded pistol, removed the ammunition magazine, and then mistakenly believing the gun to be empty fires a chambered bullet at his or her head or the head of a playmate. A magazine disconnect safety, a small safety improvement costing about 50 cents, could prevent such tragedies from occurring.
Many pistols have such a low trigger resistance that the trigger can be fired by a very young child.
The child, who was celebrating his birthday, was fatally wounded. The gun is dropped, at various angles, from a height of three feet to determine whether the gun will accidentally fire if dropped. No such test applies to domestically-manufactured handguns. Most handguns have a small lever, which when pressed prevents the gun from being accidentally discharged. Many smaller handguns in this country lack such a feature.