Growing up in Florida, my twin sister and I never knew there were guns kept in our home.

My father’s unloaded firearms — a .22 pistol and a 20-gauge shotgun — were stored in a locked cabinet in the garage behind an array of boxes, bikes, and golf clubs. He worked across the country in California, and he kept the key with him at all times.

By most standards, my father’s weapons were safely stored, but he was in the minority of gun owners: 54 percent of the approximately 77 million gun owners in the US do not practice safe gun storage, according to a 2018 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health survey. And one-third of these households with dangerously stored guns are also home to children.

This is a fact that should alarm us. In 2020, firearms surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children, with 4,357 children killed by gunfire that year. While the majority of child deaths from guns are due to homicide, an average of 35 percent between 2018 and 2021 were suicides, while 5 percent were caused by unintentional, accidental shootings.

“I often reflect on the day that our children walked out the door and one of my children returned home and for the other, I was picking out a casket,” said Julvonnia McDowell, a volunteer with the gun safety movement Moms Demand Action, whose 14-year-old son, JaJuan McDowell, was unintentionally shot and killed in 2016 by another teen who was playing with an unsecured gun. “Every time I say this, my heart breaks because our children deserve to live. They shouldn’t have to die like this.”