I’ve shot a lot of .22s at Coke cans in my life. Growing up in Nacogdoches, Texas, it was always a natural thing, guns were a part of our country lifestyle. Shooting was a common bond my sister, Leslie, had with my dad. They would be out in the pasture shooting handguns and rifles at targets, clay pigeons. It was just a shared interest. Leslie had a level of familiarity with it that I’ve never had. If I wanted to shoot myself or someone else with a handgun, I’d have to Google it first. Leslie was really comfortable using a gun.

Leslie was seven years younger than me and nine years younger than my brother—very much the spoiled and adored baby of the family. She was totally precious, with Shirley Temple curls and everything. She had such a big personality and the wildest sense of humor, the quickest wit, the comeback queen—just the funniest person you’d meet.

She’d started having issues with feeling depressed in junior high. I thought my parents didn’t handle the drama right; they sort of compensated for her. I was more tough love. As time went on, we all acknowledged she was dealing with depression. The normal things that get teen girls down would get her too far down, and it was hard for her to get back up. We worked with doctors for years: She’d be down, down, down, and then pop out of it and be so funny and so bright and bubbly. It was easy for us to tell ourselves, “We’re out of this, she’s better.” I think that’s the lie many families tell themselves. You’d look at her and think, “She’ll be okay, she’ll grow out of this.” We went on like that for a lot of years.

Leslie had just turned 24 when she died. She had a job and a boyfriend. She was definitely having a quarter-life crisis; her friends were getting married and having babies, and she was still doing what she’d been doing for a decade, living with my mom. We knew she had been struggling with depression, and that there was a gun in the house. It was East Texas—the gun was just the gun my mom had had under her mattress, because her mom had it under her mattress her whole life. It wasn’t a strange thing. I wonder if we were in another part of the country, if her death wouldn’t have happened the way it did.

I was on the road, driving my 1-year-old son and chatting with my mom on the phone. I could tell I’d woken her up, and she said, “Oh, my god, Leslie is passed out in the backyard.” And then she said she could see a gun. I told her: “Don’t go out there. You’re going to call 911 right now. And I’m going to call Dad, they’ll be there in just a few minutes.” I had to call my dad and my brother and tell them both that Leslie was in the backyard and I thought she’d been shot.

Then it was just horror unfolding. After I called my dad and brother and started driving straight from Dallas to Nacogdoches . . . I remember keening. It’s not a word I’ve used before or since. I was begging God it was a mistake. I prayed my mom was wrong. I said those things aloud over and over; I’m sure I freaked the baby out. We had a brief period where we thought it was maybe a homicide, that maybe it was her boyfriend. I thought, “Great, my brother is going to kill him and go to prison.” But the police figured out quickly it was a suicide. She had left a voice mail on her boyfriend’s phone. She had access to other weapons—guns were a hobby for her. But she took the gun that had once belonged to my grandmother from under my mom’s mattress.

The immediate aftermath was insane. It was the most surreal experience of my life. I know now, because of reaching out to other survivors of gun violence in Texas, that when people are brand-new survivors, they are going through this fog— you’re planning a funeral and you can’t believe you’re doing it. I was super levelheaded, functional, and direct, I played that role: We were going to be rational and reasonable about everything. We made a decision as a family that we were not going to hide the fact that it was a suicide. My family decided to do an open casket for Leslie’s funeral, and I said I was going to do her makeup. I got up there and couldn’t touch her. It didn’t look like her. They had done a “good job” getting her ready, but her face was so misshapen it didn’t look like her at all. There’s debate about whether suicide should be counted as “gun violence.” I can tell you that it is.

My parents’ guilt is extraordinary. My mom’s guilt is because it was her gun, at her home, and my dad’s is because shooting was a hobby for him and Leslie. Gun suicides weren’t as common among women a decade ago because they weren’t using guns, or as comfortable using guns as men were . . . my dad feels guilty he gave her that level of comfort with a gun. My brother still hunts 200 days a year. He loves guns. He does not store them in a way I am comfortable with, and he has small children. It baffles me. He’s a responsible hunter, but he doesn’t get the safe-storage component. My three children are not allowed to stay with him.

I’m not anti-gun. It’s not a big deal for me to say we’ve got guns in our home, or that my husband collects and shoots. My husband and I agree about safe storage. At home, our guns are locked in a safe. They are never out. We have car safes when our guns are in transit. We are adamant about safe storage. I told my husband that when my son turns 8, he can have a BB gun and learn responsible handling.

Statistics speak for themselves about background checks: They save lives. They cut homicides, suicides, and law enforcement shootings, almost in half. They are the biggest key to winning this battle against gun violence. I know the common denominator between suicides and mass shootings is gun access. Other nations have the same violent video games and rates of mental illness. I still can’t believe that with all the work we did with doctors, nobody ever put a hand on our shoulders and said: “Look, this is going to be a long-term thing. You’re going to think she’s better, but she is not fixed. You need to lock up the guns.” Our stats are not fuzzy about suicide. When it comes to suicide, guns are the leading problem. Suicide accounts for two-thirds of our gun deaths each day. That was never impressed upon us, ever. I think it’s because guns are taboo, especially in Texas. Doctors feel like they can’t talk about it—it’s like they’re asking about your sex life. We’ll never know if my sister would have found another way to take her own life. But I wish I didn’t have to wonder. My parents have to spend the rest of their lives wondering. The kind of depression she dealt with tends to end at age 25. If that gun hadn’t been there, if it hadn’t been so easy, would she have gotten around the corner, over the hump? Could we have gotten her through the year? What if we could have stretched it out one more year, would she be here now playing with my kids?

Treating mental health is so hard. Locking up a gun is plain simple. In addition to a national legislative agenda, awareness of mental health, and how safe storage ties into suicides by gun, that is a personal mission for me. I have three young children. As a parent, I buy the car seats, childproof the cabinets, and take all kinds of safety measures, but I can’t protect my children from shootings like that which happened in Newtown, Connecticut.

I’m so grateful to Moms Demand Action for giving me the tools to fight against this epidemic of gun violence. I no longer feel helpless when these shootings occur, because I am actively working for safer laws. That’s what moms do, we fight tooth and nail to protect our kids.

Every gun death now is personal. I know the fog that family is living in, picking out a casket for their child. I know the disbelief. It is painful. I hear about all shootings. Some hit you harder than others, and I don’t know why that is. I can list shootings in the past few years that have broken me. Some are just headlines, and some just absolutely slay you. You spend a whole day stunned. There was one little boy who got shot while he was playing with Legos in his living room. It was a drive-by shooting early in the morning, random. He got in bed with his older brother and died in his arms. I could vomit right now thinking about it.

It’s been six years and my sister’s death is still a daily presence in my life. I’m not crying daily, and my life isn’t ruined forever the way my mom’s is—she’s just waiting to die now—but it’s still a very real presence. I didn’t realize that when you lose someone so tragically, it never goes away. How does it still hurt so bad six years later? How can someone be so vibrant in one second and then like a light going out? How did it go from “here” to “never again” in a second? It’s shocking. A gun changes everything.

Gun Safety is a series about gun violence in the United States, with a new essay appearing each day until National Gun Violence Awareness Day, on June 2. To learn more about what you can do to prevent gun violence, and to participate in the Wear Orange campaign, go to WearOrange.org.