Ethan's Law Mandates Secure Gun Storage: $500 Fine for Improper Storage, Up to 5 Years in Prison if a Minor Accesses It

This bill, known as Ethan’s Law, is straightforward: it creates a federal requirement for secure firearm storage. If you own a gun, you must store it securely to prevent access by minors (anyone under 18) or any adult resident in your home who is legally prohibited from possessing a firearm. The bill also establishes a new federal grant program to pay states and tribes to adopt and enforce similar laws locally.

The New Rules of Storage: Fine or Felony

Under Section 3, keeping a gun unsecured becomes a federal violation if you know, or should reasonably know, that a minor or a prohibited resident could access it. The good news for gun owners is that the bill provides clear exceptions. You are considered compliant if the firearm is secured using a proper safety device (like a lockbox or safe), stored in a location a reasonable person would consider secure, or if the gun is on your person or close enough to be retrieved and used instantly.

If you mess up the storage requirement, the penalty is a $500 fine for each violation. But here is where things get serious: if an unsecured firearm is accessed by a minor or a prohibited resident, and that person uses it to injure or kill themselves or anyone else, the gun owner faces much harsher penalties—up to five years in federal prison, substantial fines, or both. Think about the parent who leaves a pistol in a nightstand drawer in a house with a teenager; if that teen accesses the gun and tragedy strikes, that parent is looking at a serious felony charge. Additionally, any firearm stored improperly can be seized and forfeited by the government, even if the only violation was the improper storage itself.

The Civil Liability Trap

Section 5 contains one of the most significant shifts in this legislation: it sets a new legal standard for negligence. Congress states that failing to comply with the secure storage rule automatically counts as negligence in civil court. Even more crucially, if the failure to secure the gun is the “but-for cause” of an injury—meaning the injury wouldn’t have happened if the gun had been secured—Congress says that failure should be considered the direct legal cause of the injury. This is true even if the shooting itself was an intentional, wrongful act, like an assault.

What does this mean for the average person? If you own a gun and it is stolen from your home because it wasn't secured properly, and the thief later uses that gun in a crime, you could face automatic civil liability. This provision essentially makes it easier for injured parties to sue the gun owner for damages, potentially exposing law-abiding citizens to massive civil judgments based on a regulatory failure, even if they had no involvement in the crime that followed.

Federal Incentives for State Action

Section 4 creates a Firearm Safe Storage Program, essentially a federal fund to pay states and Indian Tribes to adopt and enforce their own safe storage laws that mirror this federal requirement. States that already have such laws on the books get preference for these grants, which creates a powerful financial incentive for every state legislature to get in line. This means that even if a state currently has no storage law, this bill offers a significant financial carrot for them to implement one, using federal money to fund local law enforcement and court efforts to enforce the new rules.