Arapahoe County brings gun locks and overdose messaging into child welfare visits

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

Arapahoe County Child and Family Services, guns, and drugs

I wanted to update something I wrote about earlier. The first link below is from January this year and gives you all the detail I could find about a program (funded by the Anschutz Family Foundation) called Safe Starts at Home.

I’ll leave it to you to read the newsletter for more, but the upshot is that the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative (FIPI) at CU Medical and Public Health Schools got grant money to develop firearm-safety and drug overdose materials (and training) to follow social workers into homes. The idea being that the material can be handed out and discussed with families when the social worker visits.

At the time no one behind this effort was willing to share either the training materials for the social workers or the list of counties apparently clamoring for them.

Per the second link below (found in a recent FIPI newsletter in my inbox), Arapahoe County has implemented something similar, and seems pretty pleased with it.

Quoting from the second link:

“‘We respond after the crisis has already occurred, and we hear a lot of awful things and see a lot of awful things,’ says Christine Laster, an intake administrator in Arapahoe County. ‘We wanted to do something to try and prevent those awful things. Even though it’s rare that we have assessments where a child gets a hold of a firearm and they hurt themselves or somebody else, we wanted to be able prevent a tragedy from even happening.’ In 2024, caseworkers provided more than 100 firearm safety kits, which include a lockbox for a small handgun and two cable locks, to families they work with in Arapahoe County. The kits also include materials to raise awareness about preventing opioid overdoses. Along with the household safety kits provided by FIPI, county staff participated in SafeHomesCO, training developed by FIPI that aims to provide knowledge and skills to address challenging topics, such as firearm suicide and overdose prevention.”

There were a couple of other relevant quotes that caught my eye.

“FIPI held a two-hour long training with 10 of the Arapahoe County caseworkers that covered background information on firearm injury prevention topics, how access to firearms can increase negative outcomes, especially in children, and how to have conversations around secure storage. ‘We presented caseworkers with ways to bring up the topic of secure storage that broadened the conversation beyond firearms. We also incorporated talking about overdose prevention, as opposed to firearms only, as our approach is to focus wholistically on household safety. This sometimes makes the information more approachable for families,’ [FIPI’s research and evaluation coordinator Megan] McCarthy says.”

And:

“While still in its infancy, leaders at FIPI say the program shows the potential to be adapted to other communities that have an interest in providing support for safely storing firearms and other harmful items to children. ‘We have to keep in mind that not every community is the same,’ Simonetti says. ‘But the thought process is that there are things we can do that can translate almost anywhere. This makes it easier to replicate and investigate the effectiveness.’”

Reading between the lines on these latter quotes, I can’t help but think that it smacks of an expansion of this kind of program. Beyond just an expansion of the guns + drugs program outlined here and earlier, I mean an expansion into perhaps things like seat belts + guns or smoking + guns or [insert public health concern] + guns.

All of this not to mention expansion into other people you’d interact with, not just social workers.

I want to end with a final quote from the second link, because it made me chuckle and shake my head. I’ll just drop it here without further comment.

“That proved to be helpful, [Arapahoe County’s] Laster says. She recalls one client who said they were grateful for the lockbox so they could secure cannabis products away from children in the home.”

**I was at first tempted to think this article dealt exclusively about Arapahoe County being in the Safe Starts at Home program. By comparing dates, it’s clear that Arapahoe County ran an earlier, related program. Then they the SafeHomesCO program. Whether this is all related (does SafeHomesCO = Safe Starts at Home?) I am not sure. Sometimes grant programs change names, sometimes they’re separate but sound the same.

https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/guns-and-public-health-safe-starts
https://news.cuanschutz.edu/emergency-medicine/partnership-helps-arapahoe-county-offer-firearm-storage-solutions

Related:

Boy does Arapahoe County embrace all kinds of novel approaches to problems.

Besides the social workers, guns, and drugs I mention above, they have in the past used their health department to circulate a “harm reduction van” for those who enjoy drugs.

That newsletter linked below.

https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/remind-politicians-its-not-your-money?utm_source=publication-search

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CPR and gas prices

Have you noticed how interested the media are in gas prices (and tying them to Trump/Republicans)?

It’s kind of old by this point, a victim to legislative session and school busy-ness, but I still wanted to write about this and share. The CPR article below is an example of the liberal media’s attempts to keep gas prices (and Trump/Republican’s involvement) front and center.

Perhaps in a bid to mitigate the tilt in the reporting, the following throwaway line appears near the bottom:

“The highest recorded average price for regular unleaded gas in the U.S. was $5.02 in June 2022.”

Well, now golly. Who was Prez back then? Was it Trump or Biden?

The date provides an interesting way to compare reporting. The second link below is a CPR site search from February 15 this year (about a week before hostilities in Iran started) up to mid June.

The third link is from roughly the same period, but in 2022.

In both years, you see a whole lot of talk about how gas prices are a struggle for families. When you look at quotes from everyday people, they mention how the high prices affect them. Politicians (of both parties) are sensitive to voters and what they say, so of course, they mention gas prices too.

In both years, the two major political parties beat each other over the head about gas prices. As with politicians echoing what voters say, not a surprise.

There was a notable, albeit subtle, disparity in the coverage, however. I’ll set it up with a quote from the fourth link below, a CPR story from 2022 about gas prices. Quoting with link intact:

“The price upswing comes as the U.S. moves to ban Russian energy imports in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. In a speech Tuesday, President Joe Biden acknowledged the move could send gas prices soaring, but he said the ban was necessary to ‘deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine.'”

The reason for sharing this quote is to note that in both the Trump and Biden coverage from CPR, there is mention of a decision to go to war causing gas prices to spike. This, like the other things I mention above, is the same in 2022 and 2026.

The difference lies in how down-ballot party members are treated by CPR with regard to decisions made by their party leader.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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