Fight Like a Mother

by Shannon Watts

  I wrote this without knowing that there had been a Million Mom March in 2000 on the National Mall calling for gun reform after the 1999 Columbine shooting. I didn’t know anything about state or federal gun laws. And I didn’t know that a network of gun extremists lay in wait to attack anyone who dared to change the status quo on guns. In retrospect, that one action probably had such a big effect because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Because I was so afraid for my children’s safety, I was fearless in raising my hand to become the tip of the spear.

  The Likes on my Facebook post started coming in instantly. So did the messages. I heard from a mother in North Carolina who had resisted the urge to run to school to check on her eight-year-old after hearing the news reports—in just a few weeks she would become the state chapter leader of Moms Demand Action. I also heard from a mother in Houston who’d been out getting her family’s Christmas tree when she heard about Sandy Hook—she would go on to create a campaign in her state that persuaded hundreds of Texas companies to put up signage prohibiting open carry on their premises. And I heard from a mother in Silicon Valley who’d walked out of her job when she heard the news—she would never return to that job and became a full-time volunteer instead.

  Women everywhere were asking how they could join my organization, and I didn’t even realize I’d started one.

  As I stood at my kitchen counter, hearing the notifications on my phone and computer ding incessantly, a memory popped into my head. The month before, John and I had been on vacation in Arizona and had our horoscopes read just for fun.

  “I see you having a huge following,” the astrologer had told me. “And I see you changing laws—not as a politician, but as more of an activist. You’re leading thousands of people from your kitchen table.”

  At the time, I’d shot John a skeptical look. Me, an activist? Whatever you say, lady. I was a former public relations executive and a mom who had never signed a petition or been to a single rally.

  “You have some soul sisters,” she continued. “They’ll help you get this done.”

  I was dubious. But that phrase—soul sisters—that’s what popped into my head as the messages from moms all over the country poured in. These were my soul sisters, finding me—and in my kitchen, no less!

  As the hours went by, I began to feel in my gut that I’d tapped into something powerful. I knew moms would respond to a clarion call for the safety of kids everywhere, but this was more intense than that. This was the unwavering power of a million moms’ hearts all channeling their love, their rage, and their strength into something momentous. As one woman after another reached out to me, I had the strange sensation that I was watching a story unfold that I already knew the ending to.

  I knew we’d caught lightning in a bottle, but I couldn’t stop to contemplate it—I was too busy responding to each and every message personally.

  A frenzy of activity kept my emotions at bay the rest of that day and most of the next. I kept the TV off so we didn’t have a repeat of the situation after Aurora when Sam accidentally found out about the movie theater shooting. But as Sunday night approached, I knew I had to tell Sam about what had happened.

  I wanted him to hear about the shooting from me, not from a friend or his teachers at school, because I was certain it would send him into another anxiety spiral. As I went into his room to deliver the news, I braced myself for the worst—a meltdown or tears. I made a mental note to call his therapist the next day to help us deal with the fallout. Instead, when I told Sam what had happened, he looked at me and said, “I understand. That’s just what happens in America, Mom.” Then he casually returned to playing a video game.

  I was gutted by how quickly Sam had transformed from a boy who was traumatized by the news of a mass shooting to one who was barely fazed by it. It wasn’t an indication of his getting older; it spoke to the horrifying effect that the increasing frequency of these events was having on our entire nation.

  Sam’s nonreaction showed me in a way that hadn’t fully crystallized before just how helpless we all felt the situation had become. It deepened my resolve to lock arms with other women and mothers to do something about gun violence and to fix our broken country. I knew I couldn’t live like this anymore. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to let my children die like this!

  When the kids were back at school the next day, I started looking more deeply into gun violence in America, and I was shocked by what I learned. Mass shootings had gotten my attention and sparked my motivation, but I hadn’t realized the extent to which they are just tiny drops in an ocean of gun deaths every year.

  I had no idea that an average of ninety-six Americans are killed by guns every day—for a total of around thirty-five thousand people every year—and that seven of the people who die each day are children. And I had no idea that, at that time, there was nearly one gun in the United States for every person (that number has since risen so that now there are more guns than people in the US). I learned that America’s rate of gun homicides is twenty-five times higher than the rate in other high-income countries. I saw so clearly that we had given the gun lobby’s experiment of “more guns and too few gun laws” plenty of chances to prove itself, and it had failed. Miserably.

  I also saw that gun safety is an issue that directly affects women—and not just those of us who are mothers wanting to protect our kids. Even though school shootings and other shootings in public places are the most likely to make the news, shootings related to domestic or family violence happen every single day with little media attention. Each month, fifty American women are shot and killed by a domestic abuser. That’s more than one every day.

  I knew I’d seen only the tip of the iceberg. I also knew that a mom fighting to protect her children was way more powerful than a gun lobbyist fighting to protect gun manufacturers’ profits. Looking at the statistics helped me understand that I didn’t want to just march, rally, and protest. I wanted to bring together a badass group of women who could go toe to toe with gun lobbyists in every city and state. I wanted to raise an army of tough mothers.

  Gun Violence in America by the Numbers

  393,000,000 The number of guns owned by American civilians in 20171

  329,905,500 The US population as of October 31, 20182

  1.2 The number of guns for each and every American

  270,000,000 The number of guns owned by American civilians in 20073

  25 The number of countries with the next highest rates of gun ownership you’d have to combine to reach the total of American guns in circulation

  33,130 The number of Americans who died in gun-related deaths in 20144

  36,252 The number of Americans who died in gun-related deaths in 20155

  38,658 The number of Americans who died in gun-related deaths in 20166

  96 The average number of Americans killed by guns every day7

  8,300 The number of American kids who are sent to the hospital each year with a gunshot wound8

  10x How much more likely it is that a black American will be killed by a gun than a white American.9

  15x How much more likely it is that a black child in America will be killed by a gun than a white child10

  50 The number of American women shot to death by intimate partners each month11

  25x How much higher the rate of gun homicide (not including suicide) in America is than in other high-income countries12

  82% The percentage of worldwide gun deaths that happen in the United States13

  4.28% The percentage of the worldwide population that resides in the United States14

  Since that fateful day in my kitchen in 2012, Moms Demand Action has grown to nearly six million supporters and hundreds of thousands of active volunteers, and our numbers are increasing all the time. We have become the David to the NRA’s Goliath, despite its hundred-year head start, its long-standing relationships with politicians, and its deep pockets. And despite the unevenness of our match-up, we are winning.

  In dozens
of states, we’ve defeated permitless carry, proposals to allow guns in K-12 schools, and bills that would force colleges to allow guns on college campuses. We’ve helped pass eleven red flag laws—eight of them since the 2018 shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. (Red flag laws provide a legal means to temporarily remove guns from people who are demonstrable threats to themselves or to others; only two existed before our organization was started.)

  If you’re reading these accomplishments and feeling surprised, it’s no accident—our losses get a lot more attention in the media than our wins. After all, the old adage about the news says, “If it bleeds, it leads.” And our losses, honestly, mean that more people will die. When we help beat back a bad gun bill—which we do hundreds of times every year—it doesn’t get covered because it doesn’t have the drama that draws attention.

  Despite the quiet ups and the overexposed downs of the gun violence prevention movement, we’re making important strides. But our work will never be done. That’s a feeling most moms are already familiar with. After all, being a mom is the one job you never clock out of. But somehow, even though there’s no way to prepare yourself for the demands of motherhood, you just do it. This is what gave me the courage (or stupidity?) to start that Facebook page. I didn’t know what would come of it; I just knew I had to do it.

  That knowing is maybe something you’ve felt before, too—a calling to take action, even though you have no idea what that action might be. I’ve learned that those moments of knowing are gifts. No matter what horrible event led to them, those flashes of insight have so much power in them—and if you act on them, they’ll lead you exactly where you need to go. You’ll find your soul sisters, and together you’ll move mountains.

  If this feels daunting, I get it. As a mom, you may feel too overwhelmed by keeping up with your family responsibilities or the deliverables at work to even think about getting involved in such a thing, much less actually creating change. But everything you’ve done and felt as a mom gives you enormous and uniquely powerful strength.

  After all, activism equals organizing, and if there’s one thing moms know how to do, it’s organize. Moms also have extremely well-honed multitasking skills. We’re used to doing all of the jobs, from scheduling and hosting family events to advocating on behalf of our kids to putting our foot down when someone’s out of line—all things that translate directly to advocacy. And we have numbers on our side—there are eighty million moms in the United States alone. Moms make miracles happen in their households every day. But if we unite to work together? We’re unstoppable.

  In a time when so many things divide Americans, the issues that speak to moms cut across party lines, as evidenced by the fact that our membership comes from both red and blue states. Of course, it also includes women who aren’t moms—and men. Nothing makes me smile more than seeing a man in one of our red Moms Demand Action T-shirts. Since the earliest days, we have said that Moms Demand Action is for “mothers and others”—but to be clear, women are taking the lead.

  Because for too long, women have been asked to make the food, set up chairs, and own the menial tasks of advocacy while men set the strategy and bask in the spotlight. Women have done all the work, and men have gotten the credit. It’s high time we changed that!

  NRA members love to use intimidation as a weapon—later in this book you’ll hear about the threats I’ve received and the men with semiautomatic rifles who show up at Moms Demand Action meetings—but here’s a truth for you: moms are scarier than gun lobbyists. Gun lobbyists hide behind anonymity, legislative bureaucracy, and stacks of money. Meanwhile, moms already go into battle every day for the people they love. Activism just channels that warrior energy into a different arena.

  Fight Like a Mother is part manifesto, part memoir, and part manual, and I wrote it because I often wished I’d had a guidebook to help me find my way in the years since I first created that Facebook page. Since that fateful day, I and the army of volunteers who fuel Moms Demand Action have distilled eleven principles—mantras if you will—that guide our actions, help us stay on track, and keep us motivated. In this book I’ll walk you through each of them so you can take what we’ve learned and put it to use fighting for the things that matter to you, whether that’s commonsense gun laws, reproductive rights, environmental protections, education reform, or whatever else gives you that feeling that it’s time to act.

  I’ll also share a behind-the-scenes look at how Moms Demand Action has become the gun lobby’s worst nightmare—you won’t believe some of the things that have happened!—but my sincerest wish is that this book will inspire you to get out there, raise some hell, and do some good. It’s time to fight like a mother!

  1

  Use MOMentum

  During the first few days after Sandy Hook, everyone was waiting for the NRA to issue a statement. Yet NRA leaders stayed strangely silent. I, along with so many of the other women I was now connected to as my Facebook page grew by hundreds of people a day, took the organization’s delay as a sign that it “got it”—that this shooting had gone too far and it would finally realize it was time to make it harder for dangerous people to gain access to guns. It seems so naive, even laughable, that we thought this—especially knowing what I know now about how there appears to be no bottom to the NRA leaders’ deranged commitment to removing all legal restrictions to gun ownership. But that’s why, when the NRA announced a press conference for December 21, 2012—a full week after the massacre—I couldn’t help but feel hopeful and even a little excited to go to the broadcast studio in downtown Indianapolis to provide an on-camera reaction to its statement on MSNBC.

  As I sat off camera, listening to NRA executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre speak through my earpiece, I was incredulous. First, he blamed music videos, movies, video games, and the media for school shootings. Next, he called for creating a national database of the mentally ill. Then he uttered the infamous line, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” And he ended by proposing a nationwide effort to put armed officers in every school and said the NRA would provide the training, free, as a gift to the country.

  By the time he was done talking, I had gone from shocked to pissed. Which is why, when a reporter from USA Today got ahold of me on my phone minutes later, I desperately wanted to say something that was going to get heard; something that reflected how, as a mother, I was offended and in full-on mama bear mode; something that essentially said, How dare you? And so I told the reporter, “[The NRA is] about to see a tsunami of eighty-four million angry moms coming out at them. Angry moms like they have never seen before.”

  Those words came out of me in a moment of maternal fire, and ever since, they’ve served as a beacon for Moms Demand Action. Granted, my Facebook page was less than a week old, but I knew that American moms would not let this stand. That outrage has been instrumental in helping us grow quickly and stay strong.

  Society frowns on angry women—we’re often described as being shrill or unhinged; we’re called harpies, bitches, and worse when we let our fury show. But those big emotions that offend so many are key ingredients for transformation. As a mom, there is likely always some kind of injustice in the world making you feel rage or anguish or both. Whatever emotion is pulling at your heartstrings, go with it. Those intense feelings aren’t meant to torture you, or to make you feel disempowered, but exactly the opposite. Any heartache you may be feeling about where the world is headed means one thing: it’s time to go from outraged to engaged.

  All you have to do is decide to heed the call—you don’t need training, prior experience, or even a lot of time. So many of the active volunteers of Moms Demand Action, myself included, are accidental activists—we were never particularly politically active, and we certainly never imagined we’d become leaders in the gun safety movement. In fact, very few of us would have said we had the extra bandwidth to become activists. But we all felt called to action by a momen
t that made us realize we could no longer stand on the sidelines.

  The volunteers who’ve joined Moms Demand Action have each had their own moment that spurred them into action: whether it was hearing about yet another mass shooting, or losing a friend or family member to gun violence, or sending their kids to school and finding out that lockdown drills have become a routine part of an American education. Most mothers cannot fathom that their kids—even preschoolers and kindergartners—will regularly spend part of their school day rehearsing for the possibility that someone with a gun will come into their school and murder as many people as possible.

  You may not see yourself as an agent of change. (Yet.) After all, you’re probably plenty busy taking care of your kids and making a living. You might think you don’t have the time, energy, or guts to be an activist. Well, I have two words for you (and I say them with love): Stop that! You have so much potential to effect change—more than you know.

  I’m not the only one who thinks so. I had the great pleasure and honor of interviewing Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi for this book, and here’s what she had to say to me about the power of moms: “Being a mom, what are you? You’re a diplomat, focused on interpersonal relationships. You’re a chef. You’re a chauffeur. You’re a problem solver. You’re a nurse. You’re a health-care provider. You do so much, and that’s just with the children, not to mention the other aspects of family. And moms bringing those collective skills to an issue make us unstoppable. Never bet against moms—we are organized, mobilized, and determined to advocate for our children’s safety.”

  The power of mothers to effect change is not a new phenomenon: women have been the secret sauce in the progress we’ve made on many social issues throughout history. Just look at Prohibition. In the 1800s, chronic drinking in the United States had contributed to many social problems, including the abuse of women and children. Eventually, women began to organize, which gave rise to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Because sobriety was considered a Christian value, women—then the religious standard-bearers of American families—were allowed to be on the front lines of the war to eradicate alcohol. Women never looked back and continued fighting political battles in America to end child labor, expand voting rights and civil rights, stop drunk driving—all the way up to exposing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. It’s almost always women who are leading the charge for social change, and gun violence prevention is no different.