There are no guns in this house. There, I said it, and now you know: while I’m positive there are other dangers lurking around my disorganized household, you can send over your kids to play and know they will not find a gun, locked away or otherwise, anywhere. Not here.

My friend Carissa in Dallas doesn’t have any guns in her house either. Like several parents I know, she opened up about her gun status after the unspeakable tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School a few weeks ago. She posted on her Facebook page: “One time, when dropping my son off at a new friend’s house to play, the parent said: ‘We don’t have any guns in the house. Just so you know.’ In the moment, that was really strange. But after thinking about it, I really appreciated the information. There are no firearms in this house.”

My heart jumped when I read Carissa’s post — why hadn’t I ever considered whether or not my sons’ friends have guns in their homes? I have three rambunctious, curious boys who are 9, 6 and 2. Not only have my husband and I never talked to them about what to do if they find a gun at a friend’s or relative’s house, we have never talked to them about guns, or gun safety, at all. And it had never occurred to me to ask another parent about guns in the home, even though we live in Tennessee, recently ranked 12th in the nation for gun ownership. (Our neighbor Kentucky is No. 1.) While it might make our job easier if a local newspaper published an online database of those with gun permits, as The Journal News in White Plains recently did — that’s probably not going to happen around here, and we will need to address guns with our kids anyway.

Conversations about kids and guns are a part of being American, though I doubt they’ve ever been more present than now. Do parents need to talk to each other more about whether or not we have guns in our homes? Last February, after a school cafeteria shooting in Ohio, KJ Dell’Antonia wrote, “I assume, as you do, that most of the adults around me are doing the best they can to keep their families safe, and I would find it very hard to have a conversation with most of them that they might construe as suggesting otherwise.” I couldn’t agree more — but have the events in Newtown changed how we feel about having this conversation?

While 40 percent of married American households contain guns, studies regarding parental perceptions about how much kids know about their guns are more concerning. One study performed by the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that about 73 percent of younger children and 79 percent of older children knew the storage location of their parents’ guns, yet “39 percent of parents who reported that their children did not know the storage location of household guns and 22 percent of parents who reported that their children had never handled a household gun were contradicted by their children’s reports.”

In another related study published by the journal Pediatrics, a majority of both gun owners and non-gun owners — 87 percent — were equally likely to believe that their kids, when faced with a gun, would not handle it. The main reason parents gave was that their kids were “too smart for that,” even though, according to the study, “Only 40 percent based their predictions on specific instructions they had given their children.” That leaves 60 percent of kids — kids like mine — with no information or instructions on firearms whatsoever.

Even though my sons aren’t yet at an age where they will be playing at someone’s home without an adult at home, my oldest two can play unsupervised. When my boys swim at a friend’s pool, I always ask if adults will be supervising, and I remind my sons about the rules of the pool. Why should firearms be any different? As Carissa put it: “I’d rather like to know if my son is in a house that contains firearms so that I can invite them to play at our house instead. But how does one ask that, without offending?”

She read my mind. Will talking to other parents about guns — especially in a state like mine or Carissa’s — come off as some kind of offensive political affront? Even though I’m less concerned about offending others than keeping my children safe, I still don’t want others to feel as if we can’t be friends, or our kids can’t be friends, just because they own a gun. Carissa is convinced that we parents need some sort of script. “We need a dialogue for these sorts of things,” she said. “Like, I need to know my lines when I have to approach a parent.”

In search of Carissa’s script, I called another friend, Dr. Louise Merritt, a psychiatrist and therapist here in Nashville. When I asked her how I could talk to a parent friend about guns without being offensive, she suggested being as open and honest as possible. “Say something like: ‘I’m very worried about mentioning this, because I don’t want to be divisive, but as a mother, my instincts run deeper. And so I really do need to ask if you have any firearms in your home.’”

And my fear of offending someone? “You could say, ‘I really look forward to a friendship with you, and my child is looking forward to a friendship with you that’s ongoing — it’s just this is something very important to me, and something I want to address early on.’”

Even phrased in this way, would my asking about other parents’ guns come off as paranoid, or judgey? I don’t know, I haven’t tried it yet. I’m still thinking about how to talk to my sons about the dangers of guns, and haven’t yet had the occasion where I’d need to ask.

But I’d still like more parents like my brave friend Carissa to break the gun conversation wide open. Surely we could work together, honestly addressing all the issues surrounding gun violence, from mental health to multiple-round magazines to the ever-present reality that curious children don’t always obey the rules, even when they know them. Maybe if we talked more openly about the guns in our homes, it would open the dialogue between parents — both the gun-owning and the not — about what we can do, collectively, to help prevent another Sandy Hook, Columbine or Aurora — or even the accidental shootings that happen every single day. If we must have guns, the very least we can do is everything in our power to ensure all of our kids are safe.

Are there guns in your home? Have you talked to your kids about guns? Help me start the dialogue.