The just-completed holiday season is synonymous with gorging ourselves, stringing our lights, and battling department store lines. Unfortunately, the season (or, more accurately, the period after) is synonymous with a more sobering trend: higher depression and suicide rates.

Though there are no quick fixes for depression , there are immediate actions we can take that will save lives of those contemplating suicide, especially the lives of our children and adolescents.

Before you toss this paper down in disgust at some liberal attempt to promote gun control, think about 15-year-old Michael, recently moved to a new town and forced into a new social dynamic in his freshman year of high school. He's quiet, a little awkward, and he made a casual remark in class in his second week of school that turned a school bully against him. Now Michael is cruelly reminded whenever he walks down the halls how unacceptable he is. He turns on his computer and sees hate messages on Facebook, in email, on a blog created to humiliate him. Then, one day, the taunting reaches a tipping point, and Michael decides he can't take it.

According to Harvard School of Public Health, youths who unsuccessfully attempted suicide report that one-third made the decision on the same day and in many cases the same hour, and the majority who chose guns as their means stated "availability" as the reason. So the fact that Michael knows his dad keeps a loaded handgun in his closet is enough, in that moment of despair, for him to go get that gun and use it. And now Michael is a statistic, since more than 90 percent of all suicide attempts with firearms are fatal. And Michael's father must live the rest of his life carrying the guilt.

Although most handgun owners keep firearms for protection, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention reports a staggering 83 percent of gun-related deaths in those homes are suicides, most committed by a family member or friend of the gun's owner rather than the owner himself. It's not too late for firearm owners to consider giving the gift of increased safety by storing their firearms locked, unloaded, and separate from ammunition. Or they may take a bolder move and get guns out of the household altogether, since a 1991 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the presence of a firearm, no matter how safely stored, increases the likelihood of a suicide attempt in that home.

Firearm owners are not the only ones who can give this gift. Communities can sponsor gun buy-back programs and raise awareness of the ways gun owners can obtain free trigger locks and other safety mechanisms.

At the state level, North Carolina's child access prevention law, which requires firearm owners in homes where children may be present to store their guns safely, could and should be strengthened to make it a felony for an owner when a child accesses an unsecured firearm and causes harm.

Let's take a moment to realize that children are by far the most likely victims of gun violence in our homes if a gun is present, and let's all make the decision to love them more than we fear the villains.