This Question Can Save Lots of American Lives. The Question Most American Doctors Should Ask Their Patients.

"You’d be surprised how many people have guns in their houses," said Dr. Jill Creighton.

As a pediatrician at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital on Long Island, Creighton routinely asks her patients' parents during their children's regular checkups whether or not they own guns -- a question that roughly a quarter of them answer

affirmatively.

"There’s a lot of people who have guns for hunting on the tip of Long Island," Creighton said. "Even if they don’t have [guns] themselves, maybe that’s something they should ask a fellow parent if their child is going on a playdate."

For Creighton, asking parents about firearms is a routine part of her practice, she learned while training at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the 1990s. For many doctors, however, it's far from routine to inquire. There's no good data on how many doctors counsel patients on firearm safety, but according to a new paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this week, it's not nearly enough.

"Physicians not only have a responsibility to their patients to diagnose and treat illness, they also have a broader societal obligation to improve population health," Dr. Steven Weinberger of the American College of Physicians wrote in editorial accompanying the paper. In a nation where 33,559 people died of gunshot wounds in 2014, teaching patients about firearm safety needs to be part of that responsibility.

Too few studies have been done on the efficacy of asking about guns for reducing violence to draw any definitive conclusions. But one 72-article meta analysis on clinical firearm screenings published this year found that health care interventions could increase rates of safe gun storage for at-risk individuals.

The authors of that report, which was published in the journal Epidemiological Reviews, noted that current literature on the subject is of low methodological quality and that larger, more rigorous and better-funded studies are needed.

But the authors of this latest study defended their recommendations in the face of limited evidence: "Because firearms are the most common means of violent death in the United States, the lack of rigorously validated tools should not, in itself, deter screening," they wrote.

What's more, specific studies yield clearer answers. For example, when families of suicidal teens were counseled by a psychiatrist about firearm access, a third of them removed the firearm from the home. (It's worth noting that there was no control in the study, so we don't know if the families would have removed the guns without counseling.)