The Cost Of Your Life

Georgia, Guns, and a Lesson from Ida B. Wells

I am not surprised the National Rifle Association has an article on the anti terrorism and civils rights journalist Ida B. Wells.

Ms. Well’s clear assessment of being a Black woman in America led her to a simple realization. In terms of the law and the politicians and citizens who created it, she was expendable. She was allowed, under state law and state inaction, to be terrorized, tortured, and murdered by White supremacist terrorists. Of which there were many!

So many aggrieved men and women, believing themselves to be White, felt better about their place in society after killing and maiming the bodies of the people they hated.

I think of that simple assessment every time I hear that another little boy has legally purchased a firearm and walked into a school to kill and maim the bodies of people he hates to feel a little better about himself.

And we watch, sitting on our hands, and say well this is America and we are free to do this.

Ida disagreed with this, with the routine normalcy of lynching. Lynching as a form of terror was a church picnic past time. It was a weekend delight for White communities. It was a way to pass the time. It was not to the country as a corporation of laws and economy, a travesty. Not until the people said enough.

The NRA loves that Ida B. Wells gave a full-throated defense for people to carry guns to kill the White Supremacists who came after them. But they twist her legacy stopping at simply “arming” the populace.

Ida B. Well’s legacy is not the guns she carried, but the inner dignity she held onto and the indignity she had towards men who exploited the law to terrorize and kill innocent people.

Ida B. Wells would not sit by during mass shootings as politicians and companies got rich off dangerous and nonsensical gun laws. She would absolutely have defended a culture that sought to disarm hateful, irresponsible, domestic terrorists.

She would have looked at the way our lax gun regulation routinely hurts the most vulnerable in America -children, women, domestic abuse victims- and had something fiery to say about it.

I try not to make a habit of speaking for the dead. But every year, every day, the acclaimed nation of America has a mass shooting that claims the lives of women and children and mentally ill little boys. Respectfully, I don’t have to speak for the dead because their stories are literally screaming in hallways, in food courts, in bedrooms, malls, and classrooms that something is terribly wrong with the way we sell and hold firearms in the country.

Hunt deer, not children. Any law that makes it easier to hunt children or women trying to leave a bad relationship should be prioritized over a man doing whatever he wants with a tool that can kill people.

You can stop voting for people who get money from the gun lobby by googling your candidate.

You can call your reps with a quick Google search or email them.

You can look up Everytown, Moms Demand Action, and Kitty Hates Assault Rifles to learn what your neighbors are doing.

The point is not that we’re going to change everything overnight, though we could if we were aggressive enough. The point is that we prepare the way and make each day inch closer to a future in which this kind of domestic terrorism is stamped out.

It’s been done before. It can be done again. May Ida’s memory and witness be a blessing. And to the NRA: pick your ancestors more carefully.

Ida B. Wells was noted in the historian Paula Gidding’s work A Sword Among Lions having said that if someone dared to take her life, she would make the price dear. People who make money off of unregulated angry children and immature men buying guns and politicians who take NRA money and lobby money have already decided what the dollar amount of your life is worth. These people are willing to play Russian roulette with your children’s lives. They are more than willing to ask you to bear the cost of attending a fourth of July parade or an outdoor country music concert.

We the people have to decide what the value of our lives will be. There people have decided it is only worth their second and third and fourth vacation homes. They have defaulted on the happiness and liberty of our children. That's not good enough. Let's start here, knowing we build a future on the shoulders of women like Ida who did not accept the normalization of domestic terrorism.

Yolanda Renee King, MLK jr’s granddaughter, a gun violence prevention activist.