Two-thirds of gun-owning families fail to store their firearms safely, posing a potential risk to children at home, according to a pediatric study that questioned parents on the topic when they brought children in for well-child doctor visits.

Locking up all guns lessens the odds of firearm accidents or suicides among children, according to a team led by pediatric researcher Robert DuRant of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. The findings appear in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics.

"If guns will not be removed from homes where children live and play, then the safe storage of those guns becomes a health priority," the study said.

The Utah Shooting Sports Council's Clark Aposhian said he was skeptical of such a study, believing it artificially inflates the number of actual accidental shootings involving children and unsecured firearms.

"The whole idea of this study is, in my opinion, meant to elicit a knee-jerk response that is generally defamatory towards firearms," he said.

Aposhian said that does not mean he is against the secure storage of firearms. In fact, he said depending upon the household, gun locks and gun vaults are appropriate.

"We're more realist as well in that we'd rather educate," he said.

About a third of those responding said they have at least one gun, with rural households likelier than urban homes to own two or more firearms and store them unlocked, the report found.

Still, serious gun injuries to children are 10 times more common in urban environments than rural ones, the study said. Researchers attribute the difference to "long-established cultural differences," including rural residents' greater familiarity with the weapons, commonly used for recreation.

Urban residents tend to keep guns for protection, a purpose that may provide fewer opportunities for practice, the study said.

Researchers found that the gun type was associated with storage habits. Long-gun owners store their guns in places other than a locked cabinet, but with the ammunition in a separate location. Handgun users were more apt to store the guns loaded and to use gun locks. They also found that those not raised with a weapon at home were more likely to store guns safely, as were long-gun owners with children 2 to 5 years old, compared to families with older children.

Gun ownership in the United States ranges from 5.2 percent of homes in Washington to 63 percent in Wyoming, the study said.

The study sample came from 96 pediatric practices in 45 states, Canada and Puerto Rico. During routine well-child visits to the pediatrician, the parents of 3,745 children ages 2 to 11 were questioned. Most of the study respondents were female.