The entire country mourns the loss of 20 children and six adults in Connecticut last week. It may be hard to relate, as I am not a parent, but I have seen and experienced loss in the Black community over and over again. And I have experienced, just this month and also in the past, the fear of losing a friend to a gun. So while I feel empathy for the parents of the 20 children who lost their lives last week, the words and anger of one of my dear friends ring clear: Black parents face this fear, the fear of your child not coming home, literally every day.

But I have been told that maybe this isn’t the appropriate time to say this out loud.

A report titled “Protecting Children, Not Guns,” released by the Children’s Defense Fund, states: “Black males 15 to 19 were eight times as likely as white males of the same age and two-and-a-half times as likely as their Hispanic peers to be killed in a gun homicide in 2009.” Adding, “The rate of gun injuries was 10 times higher among Black children and teens than it was among white children and teens.”

This information should not be labeled circumstantial in the news or buried as unrelated to the current story at hand. When your children, or future children, are eight times as likely to be killed, that is no insignificant fact and clearly nothing to keep quiet about.

Just as President Barack Obama remembered that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin, I know that when I have children, they will look like the 13 children of color who were killed by police in the first half of the year alone, according to a report by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. That is indeed a mass shooting that is historical, continuous and ongoing, even as we list the past mass shootings that we have endured as a country this year.

In the president’s speech Sunday in response to the Sandy Hook school shooting, he spoke about the country as a whole, but his comments are just as true, and maybe more urgent, when applied to police shootings and other gun violence in communities of color.

“We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

My heart goes out to the parents of children lost at Sandy Hook and for every parent, friend or family member who has lost a child to a gun.