Mass shootings get all the headlines. But it’s only quietly reported that there has been, on average, one school shooting every single week in 2018. How do children get guns? The Wall Street Journal reports that in 75 percent of school shootings, the gun was from home.

This made me think about another fact we never read about. Eight children and teens are unintentionally injured or killed by guns every single day, or 2,747 kids a year. Since the devastating Sandy Hook mass shooting, nearly 14,000 kids have been killed or injured because of unlocked and unsupervised guns in their homes. In that same time period, the New York Times reports that 400 people have been killed in school shootings.

For war veterans and gun violence survivors, physical and mental recovery can last a lifetime. Our homes should not be war zones. As Chuck Neighbor, a Korean war Navy veteran, told me in our local coffee shop, “Gun safety is not Republican or Democrat. It’s for our children. It’s common sense.”

If our military does everything possible to avoid “friendly fire,” or mistakes that kill our own people, why do we accept “family fire”? In America, 1 out of 3 homes with kids has a gun, and 1.7 million children live in a home with an unlocked, loaded gun. Gun ownership is everywhere, nearly 50 percent of gun owners are rural, 28 percent live in suburbs, and 19 percent are in cities.

Wherever you live, your child or grandchild may be visiting a home where they are at risk of being one of the eight children injured or killed every single day because of careless gun storage.

What can we do? If you’re a gun owner, you can pick up a free trigger lock from most police stations. Better yet, buy a gun safe and bolt it to a structural wall, and make sure that your guns are always locked, with the ammunition stored separately.

Perhaps, like Jerry Spagnoli, veteran from the 352nd psychological operations Army battalion in Vietnam, you’re packing up to move. As Spagnoli said, “I found a gun lying around, I had forgotten I even owned it. I thought, why do I need this? So I took it to a gun buyback in San Francisco and turned it in. Very easy.”

If you are interested in keeping your family and community safe from gun violence, head to www.endfamilyfire.org for storage and safety.

Kath Tsakalakis, a military veteran, is a gun violence prevention volunteer.