(CNN) Fewer Americans are likely to own a gun now than 40 years ago, but those who do are more likely to own handguns over rifles or shotguns. As the proportion of those with handguns has increased, so has the number of children under the age of 5 who are dying from firearm injuries, according to a new study.

"We are concerned that children are dying from preventable reasons and wanted to study ways to keep this from happening," said Kate Prickett, a family sociologist and demographer at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and lead author of the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Prickett and her team used previously collected national statistics to estimate the number of children under 5 who died as a result of a firearm injury from 1976 to 2016, as well as the number of families who owned guns and the types of guns they owned.

Over the 41 years in the study, the proportion of families with young children who owned firearms decreased from 50% to 45% for white families and from 38% to 6% for African-American families.

In white American households, handguns went from 49% of the total guns owned in 1976 to 72% in 2016. This increase was associated with a doubling of child deaths from firearms over the past decade, partially explaining it, according to the study.

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