My daughter Angela was a beautiful, fun-loving person. She adored her three children and her entire family, and was always the first to offer help to others. She would give her last penny to someone begging on the streets of Minneapolis, and then come borrow money from me. With her children, she made everything a playful game. Every year our family would go to the Renaissance Festival, and Angela would love to dress herself and her children in costumes of the time. When I think of her, I think of her big smile and her huge heart.

Angela also suffered greatly. In the last year of her life, she was hospitalized four times for severe depression and mental illness. Each stay averaged about two weeks. In those times in the hospital, and the days and weeks in between, she was put on many different medications, underwent electroshock therapy, consulted with psychiatrists and other doctors, and participated in group therapy. I supervised her medications and went along to her appointments, where most of the time she would curl up in a chair with a hood pulled over her head and cry. Her last few months were volatile. She slept in her car. She could no longer care for her children; her oldest, who was 11 at the time, came to live with me and my husband while her two other children stayed with their father.

Depression was not new to our family. Angela’s father suffered from depression, and when she was only 5 years old, he took his life with a gun. We had some very difficult times as a family, but Angela, our baby, loved her father deeply. I know his death had a profound impact on her.

On May 5, 2011, two days shy of her 31st birthday, Angela went to a gun store near my home and bought a gun. Two months later, on July 5, the 26th anniversary of her father’s suicide by gun, she checked into a hotel and ended her life. Angela, like her father, uncle, and great-grandfather before her, had become yet another statistic in America’s gun-violence crisis. I was notified the next day by the coroner’s office that my daughter was gone forever.

Angela, the beautiful baby girl I held close to my body to help keep her temperature up right after she was born. The cherubic 2-year-old who watched the fireworks and declared “Holy cow” with every loud burst. The teenager who drove us to the edge of sanity and back again. The young woman who would drive across town to take her grandmother to church every Sunday and join my mother and me for Saturday breakfasts. The loving mother of three beautiful children. Gone forever.

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One of the most difficult things for me to grasp was that my daughter’s medications were better regulated than the guns and bullets she used to end her life. I was shocked to learn how loopholes in our laws allow people who pose a danger to themselves or others to easily purchase firearms in this country. I learned that more than 30,000 Americans die each year from gunfire, and more than two-thirds of those deaths are suicides.

At her funeral, a relative had the audacity to tell me we have enough gun laws in this country. At that moment I knew I had to fight for change. At first, I was out there alone, knocking on doors, making phone calls, and emailing everyone from the Minneapolis chief of police to the President of the United States.

It is so important to me, and to all those who have had someone taken from them, that our loved ones are acknowledged, that others know how important their existence was on this earth. When I fight for my daughter, and for the other survivors I have met, I am giving them a legacy. It means they did not die in vain. I know it’s too late to save Angela. But if I can help spare the next mother the pain of losing her daughter, I will never give up.

Gun Safety is a series about gun violence in America, 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.