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I grew up in the shadow of my grandfather's suicide. It was my mother’s father. He shot himself in 1958 when my mom was 17. 

Despite this ugly tragedy, I don’t hate guns. I actually like shooting them. And I've fired some big ones, like a .357 magnum and an AR-15, starting when I was in Boy Scouts. But I still see firearms in a different way.

That's why when a recent study by the premier medical journal JAMA said nearly 7 million U.S. children, ages 17 years and under, live in homes with at least one unlocked and loaded firearm, I shuddered. 

Part of me says these are 7 million future catastrophes that can’t be avoided because we live in a country with an unrelenting firearms fetish.

But another part of me believes we can help those kids be a lot safer – if we can better understand the reality of gun deaths and take some simple and reasonable precautions.

The facts about guns tell a different story

A long-running cultural narrative says we should rely almost entirely on ourselves for........

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