Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith Over Gun Violence: A Mother's Story
Description
From the national spokesperson for Everytown for Gun Safety and leading gun violence prevention advocate comes the riveting memoir of a mother’s loss and call to action, as well as a faith-based exploration of how the nation’s gun laws put a deadly target on American lives.
Lucia Kay McBath knew deep down that a bullet could one day take her son. After all, she had watched the news of countless unarmed black men unjustly gunned down.
Standing Our Ground: Putting Faith in God Over Faith in Guns is McBath’s memoir of raising, loving, and losing her son to gun violence, and the story of how she transformed her pain into activism. After seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis was shot by a man who thought the music playing on his car stereo was too loud, the nation grieved yet again for the unnecessary loss of life. Here, McBath goes beyond the timeline and the assailant’s defense—Stand Your Ground—to present an emotional account of her fervent fight for justice, and her awakening to a cause that will drive the rest of her days.
But more than McBath’s story or that of her son, Standing Our Ground keenly observes the social and political evolution of America’s gun culture. A must-read for anyone concerned with gun safety in America, it harkens back to such bestsellers as The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace and Nobody.
Praise for Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith Over Gun Violence: A Mother's Story
“Moving, poignant… a heartfelt call to action for advocates of common-sense gun laws.”
— Kirkus Reviews
"Lucy McBath turned her own personal tragedy into action by becoming a staunch advocate for civil and human rights. Lucy is a truth-teller, justice warrior, a fighter, and a crusader in her quest to lift the humanity of the most vulnerable amongst us. I look to her for inspiration daily."
— Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke
“Lucy, in the face of tragedy, turned her sorrow into a strategy, and her mourning into a movement.”
— Hillary Clinton
“What awes me about Lucia is not simply the fact of having endured the loss of a child in the manner she did, but her sheer strength of character, which has allowed her to turn that loss into our gain. Lucia has taken it as her mission to live beyond the pain of her loss and to prevent more of our children from meeting at those crossroads.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me
“[A]cross the nation . . . Lucy has become the David to the gun lobby’s Goliath, proving that when gun violence survivors and mothers speak out, we can and will win.”
— Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America