A decade may have passed since her son Terrell was killed in a church parking lot on the south side of Chicago at the age of 18, but to Pamela Bosley, the loss lingers as though it were yesterday.

Some mornings she struggles to get out of bed. On other days she is plunged back into her grief by the inevitable news of another child killed in a city grappling with one of the deadliest epidemics of gun violence in America.

Chicago’s rates of murder and violent crime have long been on the rise, but the city has come under the spotlight as a so-called “war zone”, a sentiment captured by director Spike Lee in his new film Chi-Raq, set in the city’s south side, with an anti-gun violence message at its core.

Its release also comes amid questions about the conduct of police in the city after a video forced into the public domain by a judge’s order revealed how 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was killed by a white police officer who fired a total of 16 rounds at the teenager.

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief of staff to Barack Obama, dismissed the city’s police superintendent over the case, but still faces intense personal pressure to resign as questions linger over why the release of the dashcam footage was delayed over a period of 13 months.

‘Chicago is two cities’

For many residents, there is a sense that they are not safe in their own city.

For Bosley, there is no closure nor any certainty that the same fate won’t befall her other loved ones.

“Chicago is two cities,” she says. “You have downtown – the place you can go and enjoy the water and the surroundings, where you feel free. And then in the urban communities, you have us out here just praying that you make it home safe, that your children make it home safe, and where no one wants to go outside.

“We live in a fearful atmosphere, because we don’t know if we’re going to make it home.”

Sitting inside a recreational center where she works with children as part of a free after-school program, Bosley takes note of the funeral that is about to begin at the adjacent St Sabina Catholic church. It is for a 14-year-old boy who, like her son Terrell, was shot and killed despite having no connection to the gangs that account for the majority of gun-related activity in Chicago.

The week before, the city had mourned the murder of Tyshawn Lee, a nine-year-old boy lured into an alley and shot multiple times in an alleged act of retaliation between rival gang members.

In Chicago, where the toll of gun violence has become almost routine, the names are soon forgotten – turning instead into the grim statistics of a city where a couple of dozen shootings on any given weekend have become commonplace. But in the faces of the mostly young victims, flashed across the local news almost daily, Bosley sees her son Terrell.

An avid musician who played bass guitar, Terrell had just attended band practice at a south side area church called the Lights of Zion Ministries. According to an eyewitness, a suspected gang member shot Terrell in a random act of violence as he stood in the church parking lot chatting with his friends.

“We did everything to protect our children,” Bosley says, clasping a bracelet around her wrist that bears her son’s name. “Terrell wasn’t a street kid. He regularly attended church. This should not have happened to us.”

Police neither discovered a motive, nor did they apprehend a shooter.

There have been at least 2,700 shootings in Chicago so far this year, averaging roughly eight per day, according to data compiled by the Chicago Tribune.

In September alone, more than 50 people were shot across Chicago on two consecutive weekends. On one particularly gruesome Sunday, at least 26 people were shot in a 24-hour span that left three men – all under the age of 30 – dead.

Although most of the incidents are attributed to gang violence, many parents contend with the reality that they can do everything right and yet lose their children simply on account of their being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

‘The toll is generational’

There are few more memorable examples than Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old girl who died just weeks after performing with her high school band at Barack Obama’s second inauguration.

Hadiya, an honor student and school athlete, had no gang affiliation but was shot in the back while seeking shelter from the rain under a canopy at a Chicago park. Police said they suspected the gunman was targeting other teenagers standing with her who were believed to be gang members.

“The toll is generational,” Hadiya’s mother, Cleopatra Cowley, told the Guardian. “When we were growing up, we would like to go outside and play. Our children think about that totally differently – they just stay inside the house, where it’s safe.”

Hadiya, she added, would have been in college right now and perhaps pursuing journalism among other interests.

“She was always talking about what she was going to be when she grew up and that was taken from her,” Cowley said. “We did the work. She knew right from wrong, and unfortunately she didn’t have the opportunity to live out her life.”

This summer, another teenager, Vonzell Banks, was fatally shot in the back while playing basketball at a park which had been named after Hadiya. And just like in Hadiya’s case, the bullet was intended not for Banks but for a gang member who ran across the court while fleeing a rival.

Speaking at his funeral, Emanuel, the Chicago mayor, asked: “Do you think it’s too much for a city to let its parents see their kids graduate?”

Although Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, the majority of its violence stems from the possession of illegal firearms. While gun rights supporters hold up Chicago to make the case that tighter controls do not reduce violence, advocates for tougher restrictions argue it is impossible to reverse the status quo without action at the federal level.

According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 60% of the firearms used in shootings across Illinois flow in from other states where gun laws are decidedly looser. A report sponsored by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who ranks among the staunchest advocates of gun control, traced the majority of Illinois gun crimes from 2010 to 2014 back to weapons obtained in Indiana, Mississippi and Wisconsin.

Illionois laws are also less restrictive outside of Chicago, making it easier for guns to make their way into the city. Illinois as a state has no requirement for gun registration or the licensing of gun dealers and no limitation on the number of guns per purchase, nor are there mandatory background checks on private gun sales.

At a broader level, the absence of a law declaring the federal trafficking of guns as a crime renders it especially difficult for law enforcement to track the distribution of firearms to the inner city. A measure named for Hadiya Pendleton that would have made gun trafficking a federal crime was voted down by the US Senate in 2013, at the same time lawmakers failed to pass a bill on universal background checks in the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Months earlier, both of Hadiya’s parents sat with first lady Michelle Obama during the annual State of the Union address.

They looked on at one of the most memorable moments of Barack Obama’s tenure, as the president invoked many of the infamous shootings of recent years: from Sandy Hook to the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado; the shooting of former Representative Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, to the slaying of Hadiya Pendleton.

“Just three weeks ago, she was here, in Washington with her classmates, performing for her country at my inauguration,” Obama said. “And a week later, she was shot and killed in a Chicago park after school, just a mile away from my house.”

Like the countless other victims of gun violence, Obama added, Hadiya’s parents “deserve a vote”.

Hope of turning point dwindles

The American public, which overwhelmingly supported legislation requiring universal background checks, thought Obama’s emotional plea to members of Congress might be a turning point in the nation’s contentious politics over gun control.

Instead, a relatively short debate in the Senate was succeeded by the failure to take any kind of action as Republicans, joined by a handful of Democrats, blocked a universal background checks bill from advancing.

“All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” Obama said afterwards. “But this effort is not over.”

Two years later, the debate over guns seems sterile in Washington. But as the country prepares to elect its next president, Hillary Clinton wants the issue on the ballot.

The Democratic frontrunner has placed gun violence at the top of her agenda amid a series of high-profile mass shootings this year. The incidents have included the racially motivated shooting of nine African American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, the horrific slaying of two reporters in Roanoke, Virginia, while they were live on air, and now the act of terrorism which killed 14 in San Bernardino, California.

Clinton vowed she would “not be silenced” while campaigning in New Hampshire and said the suspects’ motivation had no bearing on how easily they were able to access guns.

“We can say one thing for certain: they should not have been able to do this. We cannot go on losing 90 people a day to gun violence,” Clinton said. “What will it take for Congress to overcome the intimidation of the gun lobby?

“No parent should have to worry about going to a holiday party after work or about sending their kids to school or going to a movie theater or even going to church,” she added. “No one should have that basic sense of safety and security ripped away from them.”

Most of the action toward gun safety laws since Newtown has occurred at the state level, where several governors have signed bills to expand background checks and to bar domestic violence offenders from access to guns. A majority of voters in Washington state approved a universal background checks measure in 2014 as part of a ballot vote in a sign that public opinion favors the anti-gun violence movement on at least some reforms.

The conversation has been stunted at the federal level, where mass shootings produce calls for action from Democrats that are quickly dismissed as politicization by the Republicans who control both chambers of Congress. Last week, the background checks bill faced its first re-vote since the Sandy Hook debate following the San Bernardino massacre only to fail again.

In her own gun control push, Clinton has not simply focused on the victims of mass shootings, but also on the gun-related deaths that have become ordinary in cities like Chicago and the disproportionate impact on minorities.

While in the city last month, Clinton met a group of African American parents who lost their children in shootings – including the mothers of unarmed black men killed by police. Weeks later, in Memphis, she met the parents of Darrius Stewart, a 19-year-old unarmed black man killed by a white police officer in July.

She has used such meetings as opportunities to hear from the families directly, as well as to discuss her own proposals to reform the criminal justice system and reduce gun violence.

Clinton’s long-held support for stricter gun laws is a point of contrast not only between the former secretary of state and the Republican field – where candidates are uniformly opposed to any new firearm restrictions – but also with her main Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont senator’s mixed record on gun control has been a point of contention in his otherwise progressive campaign, and a rare issue where Clinton has been consistently to his left. In the first Democratic presidential debate, Sanders cited the difference in attitudes toward guns between urban areas and a rural state like the one he represents.

While it’s true that rural Americans are more likely to possess firearms for hunting, and more inclined to oppose new restrictions, gun control advocates believe a patchwork approach to the problem in a country with 50 diverse states misses the point.

It goes back to one of Chicago’s central problems: how to prevent guns from pouring into the city based on neighboring laws that are far less strict.

Marsha Lee, who lost her 21-year-old son in a botched robbery on Chicago’s south side seven years ago, certainly feels so.

“We have a lot of issues to deal with, but this is the number one thing. You can’t get around the gun,” she said.

Lee, much like Pamela Bosley and the Pendletons, labored to keep her children off the streets. Despite divorcing their father, she and her husband raised their daughter and son in a stable environment where birthdays were still celebrated as a family and dinners often had in each other’s company.

Her home is a shrine to her late son Thomas. His pictures are everywhere: on the table in her kitchen, the shelves of her living area, along the stairwell and even in her bathroom. There are photographs from birthdays and junior prom, as well as drawings gifted to her after Thomas’ passing.

On a makeshift memorial by her window, a frame holds a hand-written note in childish script from Thomas’ youth: “I came here and got my uniform. I’m in a hurry. I love you, bye,” it reads.

“You’re supposed to bury your parents, not your child,” Lee said. “It feels like someone snatched the rug from under you.”

Thomas had neither an arrest record nor was he one to get into trouble. He attended a private Catholic school and was accepted into an apprenticeship program when he decided to defer his admission to follow another one of his passions – cutting hair.

He did a stint in barber college and came out with a dream: to cut the hair of Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator who lived on Chicago’s south side and was running for president.

On August 13, 2008, two months before Obama was elected the nation’s first black president, Thomas was leaving a convenience store with his friends and a man pointed a gun into his car. Hours later Thomas was dead, Lee said, from a gunshot wound inflicted as he struggled over the weapon in a bid to protect his friends.

“That was the beginning of the end of my life,” she said.

Lee is a volunteer with Everytown for Gun Safety, the anti-gun violence group backed by Michael Bloomberg. It makes little sense to her that relatively modest proposals like background checks, a waiting period for gun purchases, and preventing the trafficking of guns face such stiff opposition.

Clinton has embraced all of these solutions as part of her plans to reduce gun violence, which she announced last month. Her agenda would go further by seeking to roll back legal immunity for the gun industry and preventing individuals with domestic violence convictions from obtaining firearms.

Sanders backed the law that shielded gun manufacturers from litigation and voted in 1996 to limit the federal government’s ability to conduct research on gun violence. He has since changed his position on the latter and also voted for the Senate background checks bill in 2013.

Despite his inconsistent voting history, Sanders has touted a D-minus rating from the National Rifle Association and his aides say he is committed to reducing gun violence.

But the senator has not openly campaigned on the issue of guns to the same extent as Clinton.

That Clinton sees the potential to ignite a debate over guns in the presidential contest marks a shift from previous elections, when Democrats shied away from the issue.

They now have a coalition of anti-gun violence groups to counter the influential NRA. In addition to Everytown, the group Americans for Responsible Solutions has built a significant apparatus attempting to challenge the lobbying might of the NRA.

Co-founded by Gabby Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman shot in the head in 2011, ARS has vowed to hold lawmakers accountable for failing to support background checks. The group has also played an aggressive role in a state-level push on the intersection of guns and domestic violence.

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie vetoed one such domestic violence measure earlier this month, underscoring the increasingly partisan nature of the guns issue. The New Jersey governor, who faces continued skepticism from conservatives in a heated Republican primary, also vetoed other gun control bills that he previously supported.

The extent to which the gun debate will play out in 2016 remains to be seen, but Democrats are keen to frame it as an issue of accountability for the roughly 32,000 gun deaths per year in the United States.

“Republicans keep refusing to do anything to protect our communities,” Clinton recently said. “They put the NRA ahead of American families.”

The emergence of guns as a campaign issue is also a nod to the growing frustration among a majority Americans – from the suburban parents who worry if their children’s school will be the site of the next mass shooting to the Chicago area parents like Pamela Bosley, Marsha Lee and the Pendletons – who wonder if their remaining children should even be allowed outside of the house.

“Politicians are the biggest barrier themselves. It’s not about Republican, Democrat or independent, it’s about public safety,” said Cowley, Hadiya’s mother.

Bosley underscored the urgency by recalling the conversation she had with the children in her after-school program in the days that followed the death of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee.

Students had grown used to empty chairs in the classroom and peers missing from graduation ceremonies, she said, but it was rare for the youngest children to feel so vulnerable.

One of the students, Bosley said, expressed his fear out loud and asked: “Is somebody going to shoot me next?”