Michigan Gun Safe Law 2026: What the 2023 Safe Storage Act Requires

Quick Answer: Michigan’s child access prevention law, enacted through 2023’s Senate Bills 79 and 80 (Public Acts 17 and 16 of 2023), took effect February 13, 2024. It applies when an owner knows or should know a minor under 18 is or is likely to be present, and requires an unattended firearm to be locked in a container or disabled with a locking device. Violations are tiered by outcome: a misdemeanor if a minor merely possesses or displays the gun improperly, rising to a felony if the minor injures or kills someone with it. Michigan is the only state covered on this site that builds a vehicle-locking requirement directly into its home-storage law instead of a separate statute.

This guide covers what the law actually requires, how its penalty tiers work, the law’s direct connection to the Oxford High School shooting case, and how Michigan’s framework compares to the nine other state frameworks already covered on this site.

A conditional duty tied to a minor’s likely presence

Michigan’s storage law has no official single-number citation the way California’s SB 53 or Colorado’s §18-12-114 do — Giffords Law Center cites the related dealer-sale provision as Mich. Comp. Laws § 28.429, while the storage-duty itself traces to the enrolled bill text of SB 79/Public Act 17 and SB 80/Public Act 16 of 2023. The duty is conditional: it applies only when an adult stores or leaves a firearm unattended on premises they control, and they know or reasonably should know that a minor under 18 is or is likely to be present. That’s the same household-composition trigger New York’s §265.45, Connecticut’s §29-37i, and Colorado’s §18-12-114 all use — not a blanket mandate covering every firearm regardless of who’s in the house.

What counts as compliant storage

For the locking-device route, a cable lock threaded through the open action is usually a better fit than a trigger lock, because it keeps the action from closing. Our best gun locks guide compares 14 cable, trigger and chamber locks, including free options for Michigan owners.

Unlike Colorado’s two-statute split — a home-storage misdemeanor under §18-12-114 and an entirely separate 2025 vehicle law under §18-12-114.5 — Michigan keeps the vehicle rule inside the same storage duty. Leave a firearm in a car on someone else’s property, and the same locked-container-or-locking-device requirement applies to the gun, with the added condition that the vehicle itself must be locked. No other state covered on this site structures it quite that way.

Penalty tiers and the exceptions that apply

Michigan’s penalty structure is tiered by what actually happens after a minor gets access, not by the storage failure alone. Published bill-analysis summaries describe three tiers consistently: a misdemeanor (reported as up to 93 days in jail and a $500 fine) if the minor possesses or exhibits the firearm in public, or carelessly, recklessly, or threateningly around another person; a felony (reported as up to 5 years and $5,000) if the minor discharges the firearm and injures themselves or someone else; and a higher felony (reported as up to 15 years and $10,000) if the discharge causes death. Some bill-analysis sources describe an additional intermediate tier for “serious impairment” short of death that others omit entirely — a genuine discrepancy across the public record this page won’t paper over. Treat the three tiers above as the figures most consistently reported, and check the enrolled Public Act text directly before relying on an exact number in a legal filing.

The law also carries exceptions mirroring several other states covered here: no liability attaches if the minor obtained the firearm with a parent’s or guardian’s permission and supervision for employment, farming, ranching, target practice, or gun safety instruction; for lawful hunting under applicable hunting laws; through unlawful entry onto the property where it was stored; or for lawful self-defense or defense of another.

The Oxford High School connection — and what it doesn’t mean

Michigan’s law exists because of a specific case, more directly than most of the laws covered on this site. In November 2021, a teenager used a handgun his parents had purchased days earlier, and left unsecured at home, to kill four students at Oxford High School. Prosecutors charged his parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley, with involuntary manslaughter — a novel theory at the time, since Michigan had no storage-specific criminal law to charge them under instead. Jennifer Crumbley was convicted on February 6, 2024, reportedly the first such conviction of a parent in a U.S. mass school shooting. Michigan’s new safe-storage law took effect exactly one week later, on February 13, 2024.

That timing makes the connection obvious, but it also means the law isn’t retroactive — it didn’t exist when the Crumbleys left that handgun unsecured, and it played no role in their prosecution. The first person actually charged under the new law was a Flint-area man, the day after it took effect, after his 2-year-old daughter shot herself; police reportedly found no gun locks or safes in the bedroom and the firearms unsecured and loaded.

How Michigan compares to the other nine states

Michigan’s household trigger sits close in shape to New York’s, Connecticut’s, and Colorado’s conditional models. But where Colorado chose to split home and vehicle storage into two separate statutes with two separate enforcement tracks, Michigan took the opposite approach — one law, one trigger, with the vehicle scenario treated as an extension of the same duty rather than a distinct legal question.

The bottom line

Michigan gun owners face one question, not two: could a minor under 18 be present or likely present, whether at home or in a parked car. A mounted biometric pistol safe covers the fixed-location case; a portable biometric safe covers both the house and the vehicle with one purchase, since Michigan’s law treats them as the same legal duty rather than two different ones.