Just a few months before her oldest son, Weston, was about to start full-day kindergarten, Cassie Walton learned that an 18-year-old gunman had killed 19 fourth-graders at a Uvalde elementary school, a half-day drive south of the home she shares with her family.
Then the Fourth of July massacre happened in Highland Park, Illinois, a half-day drive north. The Walton family’s Oklahoma life is right in between both atrocities, smack in the middle of the American heartland – where mass shootings keep happening, over and over.
