Heidi Stevens: 'We don’t have to live this way and our children shouldn’t die this way.' Sorrow, reckoning in the wake of yet another mass shooting

Brenda Mitchell’s son, Kenneth, was shot and killed trying to break up a fight outside a Matteson, Illinois, bar in 2005.

One week earlier, her younger son, Kevin, left for his third tour of duty in Afghanistan.

“In my mind, he was the one who was in danger,” she wrote in a searing essay. “Never in a million years would I imagine Kenneth would be the one to die from an act of gun violence, right here at home in a free country.”