Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith Over Gun Violence: A Mother's Story

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.

Lucia Kay McBath is a Congresswoman, advocate, activist, and proud mom. She lost her son, Jordan Davis, in the “Loud Music Shooting” in 2012. In Fall 2020, she was once more elected to Congress in Georgia’s 6th District. She is regularly interviewed on national television, sits on panels, and delivers keynotes.

Rosemarie Robotham is a writer, editor, and literary collaborator. She started her journalism career traveling the globe as a reporter and writer for the monthly Life, and later served as a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, and as the deputy editor of Essence magazine, where her stories won numerous awards. The coauthor of the award-winning Spirits of the Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century, she is the author of Jamaica Dreams, a memoir, Zachary’s Wings, a novel, and two collections of fiction and memoir, Mending the World and The Bluelight Corner.