3rd October 1925: A gang of white men gather around J D Ivy, a black man they have blindfolded and tied to a stake in a forest in Georgia, USA. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
How do you stop a lynch mob? With a Winchester repeating rifle. That was the advice of Ida B. Wells, the great journalist who led the fight against lynching. To frustrate her work, a new form of gun control was introduced.
David Kopel is an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, in Washington. His most recent book is "The Morality of Self-Defense and Military Action: The Judeo-Christian Perspective."