When the color of your skin finally counts less than how many bullets can twist and turn inside the body of your child

I should have known from the get-go that this would be a different kind of April Thursday here in Tennessee...

After all, Martin Luther King was murdered here in Memphis, on a Thursday, on a balcony at The Lorraine Hotel, on April 4, 1968. I probably should have stayed in bed yesterday, fearing, inevitably, that there would be too much bad juju in the air on yet another single-digit April Thursday in Tennessee.

I turned on MSNBC, however, and was surprised to see, so early in the day, the wall-to-wall crowds gathered inside and outside the State Capitol in Nashville. Indeed, I jumped quickly into the shower, needing a few moments to get my bearings. WTF was going on?

Two twenty-something African-American state representatives, one from Nashville and one from Memphis, the state's two largest cities, were in the process of being expelled from the Tennessee House of Representatives. Both happen to share the same first name Justin (Jones from Nashville, Pearson from Memphis). They were being exiled on account of their activist protests against gun violence in the aftermath of the Covenant School shooting in suburban Nashville, where three adults and three nine-year-olds were murdered on March 27th.

(A third representative, Gloria Johnson, good friends with both Justins, later came within one vote of being expelled; when asked why and how she had kept her seat, Ms. Johnson coyly answered: "Do you think it might be because I am white?")

Now that I'm old enough to claim civil rights and anti-Vietnam-War props, I was thunderstruck while watching what was playing out inside the Tennessee Capitol. But not near as stunned as I was by what I saw when the TV cameras panned the grounds around the Capitol building and inside the hallways.

I was dumbfounded: a crowd in the thousands protesting the six gun deaths at the Covenant School shooting a week earlier. It was not the crowd one might expect, all while the two African-American Justins about to be expelled. No, the Nashville protesters, everywhere one looked, were overwhelmingly white!

I was also stunned. This was nothing like our 1960s protest gatherings. Given the overwhelming Republican majority in the Tennessee House -- 75 Republicans alongside just 24 Democrats -- I quickly figured out what was really going on in Nashville. And except for the Republican block-heads huffing and pontificating, I figured out there were two plays going on simultaneously.

Perhaps as much as any other place in the USA, the Tennessee gun lobby rules the roost in the Volunteer State. Indeed, last January, the state Senate and state House, overwhelmingly Republican, eliminated virtually all state gun control measures. Nada.

Early this year, our recently re-elected governor, Bill Lee -- as right-wing an American fascist that exists in these 50 states -- celebrated Tennessee's gun insanity by going 35 miles up the road from Nashville to Gallatin, Tennessee, so he could formally sign this no-holds-barred gun legislation in person, where it should be signed: at the headquarters of the Beretta USA Tennessee Campus!

(I don't know about the rest of you, but isn't it more than a little odd that Beretta USA uses the word "campus" to describe its precision-production weapons facility? In these times, maybe they should showcase their products this way: "From Campus to Campus: Beretta Gets the Job Done!")

Kenneth Neill was publisher of Memphis Magazine for more than 35 years and founded The Memphis Flyer in 1989.