Today is the first day of National Gun Violence Awareness Month.

The Lexington Fayette County Health Department is giving away free gun locks as part of its new initiative called Let's Lock It.

Lex Lexington's health commissioner, says summer is an important time to ensure firearms in the home are stored safely.

Lex Lockett Lex is the initiative that has grown out of our Lexington Community Health Improvement Partnership meetings, where we bring community partners together to discuss areas of concern and things they're saying in the community.

And so this this initiative was grown out of our crime and violence group that that meets and discusses what can we do.

And so here we are.

We're providing free free gun locks while supplies last at the health department.

You can just walk in no questions asked.

Just grab them.

They're sitting right here in the front.

They're free to anyone.

We want to, get as many gun locks in the hands of families as possible to keep children and family safe.

Gun locks are an easy, inexpensive way to keep your firearms stored properly and keep them away from, kiddos and kids that don't understand.

Maybe.

Interested?

And so it's, it's a very important issue.

And so, we want to be behind removing any barriers.

So providing free gun locks obviously is something we want to do for as long as we can.

And we have lots of community partners that are behind us with this initiative.

And so these were donated to us through community partners.

And then, as we as we need more, we're looking for more, funding to secure that.

We we actually started this in March and weren't really sure about the, about the interest in the public, but, we have given away about 450 to date, and today is our really our first launch date for this.

So, the community interest has been wonderful in public health.

We're all about prevention.

So, this will be, you know, prevention for death, unintentional harm.

We know that many suicides are, an impulsive decision.

And so creating barriers for things like that.

The other thing that, is it's summertime and kids are going to be at home more.

They're going to be away from their parents.

More parents might be working at home until we want to make sure that we're educating families on how to keep their their guns properly stored, also how to have conversations.

And so we're going to have a variety of resources there currently on our website.

And we'll share them throughout a variety of avenues.

But to educate families on how to have conversations around firearms, how to properly store those, how to have conversations with other adults about having playdates with your kids.

And so there's a variety of resources that we are putting out there for people, to utilize.