Fight Like a Mother

by Shannon Watts

  Lucy’s voice as a mother of a child killed by gun violence and as a woman of color has been instrumental in advancing the gun violence prevention movement. While I was writing this book, Lucy ran for Congress in her home state of Georgia, and to my everlasting amazement and delight, she won and will be joining the 116th Congress in the US House of Representatives. It was her first time ever running for any office, and she was elected almost six years to the day that Jordan was murdered. Out of loss that no mother can bear to even contemplate, Lucy has helped move the gun safety debate forward in huge strides.

  I hope you never have to bear a similar loss, but no matter what makes you feel pain and outrage, I hope Lucy’s story proves that what doesn’t kill you absolutely will make you stronger.

  Use Your Losses as Fuel for the Next Battle

  There’s another way to lose forward: even though you know you’ll lose, force lawmakers to publicly debate and vote on a bad bill, and then use their own words and actions to hold them accountable in the future.

  This is what Moms Demand Action did in Florida in 2016 when a bill was introduced to expand stand your ground. This bill was in direct response to a July 2015 Supreme Court of Florida ruling that said defendants must prove that they believed they were in imminent danger in order to legitimately use deadly force in response. The gun lobby wanted to lessen the burden of proof on those shooters. So they pressured lawmakers to introduce a bill that would shift that burden of proof from the defendant to the prosecutor—meaning anyone who claimed stand your ground as a defense would no longer have to prove that they felt their lives were in danger. Moms Demand Action volunteers feared that this would only further embolden people to shoot first and ask questions later, which meant more people—more black and brown people, in particular—would be shot and killed.

  Led by Chryl Anderson, a longtime friend of Lucy’s, a woman of color, and the grandmother of six, the Florida Moms Demand Action chapter activated a network of Tallahassee volunteers to show up at the statehouse at a moment’s notice while the proposed revision to stand your ground was being debated.

  Chryl learned that a Republican lawmaker reported he wasn’t getting any calls complaining “about bad gun bills.” She used this as motivation to make some noise and launched a campaign that drove more than one thousand calls and eight thousand emails to Florida lawmakers urging them to vote “no” on the stand-your-ground expansion.

  In October, while the bill was still in committee, Lucy testified against it, invoking the memory of her son. She begged the committee not to make it harder to convict armed vigilantes like the one who had murdered Jordan. The bill was tabled.

  But even winning in a politically conservative state like Florida doesn’t always feel like victory. “I knew the bill would be back,” Chryl said. And she was right; it came back in 2017. By then, a Tallahassee volunteer named Michelle Gajda had taken over leadership of the Florida Moms Demand Action chapter, and she knew she was stepping into a losing battle.

  “There was no way in hell we were going to beat back the stand-your-ground expansion this time,” Michelle said, “but I was determined that we would lose forward by holding our legislators publicly accountable for passing a bad bill.”

  Michelle continued to cultivate the rapid-response team Chryl had built. She made sure that Moms Demand Action volunteers were ready at a moment’s notice to throw on their red shirts and sit in the statehouse, waiting to testify; have conversations in hallways; or simply make eye contact with wavering lawmakers. “We provided cover for lawmakers,” Michelle said. “They could point to our volunteers in the crowd and say, ‘Look, these constituents are extremely opposed to this bill.’”

  Another way Florida volunteers lost forward that year was that they evolved from being community activists to becoming policy experts. “Legislators learned they could come to Moms Demand Action for reliable research and information,” Michelle said. “They trusted us to help them make the argument for gun safety.”

  When the stand-your-ground expansion bill went to the floor of the Florida House for a final vote, dozens of Moms Demand Action volunteers showed up to bear witness to the bad behavior of lawmakers who clearly cared more about their NRA ratings than their constituents’ safety.

  “Many lawmakers of color testified about the deadly combination of racism and stand your ground,” Michelle said. “It was devastating to hear representatives say, ‘If this passes, people who look like me are going to die.’”

  When the bill was voted through, many of the Florida Moms Demand Action volunteers stepped out into the hallway to cry. They knew they’d lost an important battle, one that would have a death toll associated with it. But they also knew that suffering losses is an inevitable part of any war—at least now they’d gotten one out of the way. Each year, there are other stand-your-ground battles to fight. Having lost this particular battle in Florida will help secure other future wins, because every loss gets you closer to a victory. Whatever fight you are taking on, the irony is that in order to progress you need to lose, and to be willing to do it again and again. It’s the only way to win.

  5

  Use Your Bullhorn

  When I went searching for the gun safety version of Mothers Against Drunk Driving after Sandy Hook in 2012, the only thing that remotely resembled what I was looking for was the Million Mom March in 2000. While that protest drew an estimated 750,000 people and spawned two hundred local chapters in the months after, it eventually fizzled—in part because NRA-friendly George W. Bush was elected president and the gun lobby began a meteoric rise in influence in both lawmaking circles and the public mind. Timing can play a huge role in whether your moment turns into a movement. And a crucial piece of what made the time ripe for Moms Demand Action to take off was something that neither MADD nor the Million Mom March had access to when they were founded: social media.

  Without this technology, Moms Demand Action probably would never have begun—after all, we started off as a Facebook page. And we certainly never would have grown to more than five million supporters, a chapter in every state and DC, over seven hundred local groups, and thousands of volunteers taking leadership roles in their community without it. Our successes prove the words of World Pulse CEO Jensine Larsen: “A woman with a laptop can be more powerful than a man with a gun.” Social media have not only helped me find my people, they have helped me find my voice. And they have helped me see that the traditionally feminine talents of communicating, networking, listening, and befriending are formidable forces of change.

  Although anyone of any gender, race, class, or country can use social media, I view social media as a woman’s bullhorn. Because on social media, there are no gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers in mainstream media—including television, print, and online news—tend to be male, and not that interested in covering the feats of women. I feel this struggle every day as other activists—often male ones—who are fighting courageously for just causes but who are not necessarily more experienced or effective than I am are invited to be interviewed on news magazines, late-night TV talk shows, and popular political podcasts.

  Even when I do get interviewed, I’m often held to a different standard. I was recently interviewed by a major daily newspaper for nearly an hour and explained all of the wins Moms Demand Action has had as an organization. The male reporter chose to quote only my male colleague, saying he’d been “more concise” during their interview. When I was interviewed on a morning national radio show about school shootings along with two men, Twitter users pointed out that the host—a man—had asked me only about the emotional aspects of such shootings; he asked the men about policy and politics.

  But thanks to social media, I can reach a large audience and bypass (mostly male) gatekeepers: all told, with my personal Twitter and Facebook accounts plus all the various Moms Demand Action accounts, my reach online is just about four million people, which is the same number of people on average who watched The Late Show with Stephen Colbert each
night in the first quarter of 2018.1 (I’d love to be on your show, Stephen!) We don’t need to wait for men to let us tell our stories anymore. We have to pull whatever limited levers of power are available to women, and social media are big levers.

  I know that some of you are reading this and thinking, Really? Do I have to? I understand that social media are not for everyone, and that using social media has its perils: it can be a time suck; it’s easy to become tethered to your phone or laptop as you check for updates, such that your work seems to invade all parts of your life; and there’s also the very real danger of being attacked for sharing your views or getting into heated and upsetting exchanges with people you may or may not know.

  I definitely believe that the benefits of social media far outweigh the potential harm, but if you just aren’t a social media person, you don’t have to use them. But you do have to decide how you’ll get and share information. (Texting is a great way to do that, one that Moms Demand Action volunteers use to alert other volunteers about events and to stay in contact with each other.) And you’ll have to find other ways to contribute, either with your time—showing up in person to meetings and events—or your money. Maybe by the end of this chapter, though, when you’ve heard all the incredible things social media enable and empower us to do, you’ll be swayed to give these tools another try.

  Use Social Media to Give You Liftoff

  If you ascribe to the belief that you should build the plane as you fly it, social media are the wind beneath your wings. They can put you on the map even before you exist in the real world; that’s certainly how that first Facebook page worked for Moms Demand Action.

  Facebook was our first home, and for good reason: it’s where so many moms hang out. We go there to share stories, family photos, interesting articles, and funny memes—it’s how we stay connected to friends and get to know new people better. And that’s exactly why Facebook was so powerful for Moms Demand Action—women were already using the platform and felt comfortable there. In our early days, our volunteers started sharing events and interacting with each other on their personal pages as well as on Moms Demand Action’s public Facebook group page. It helped us become friends as well as fellow activists.

  And while Facebook is still the largest social media platform, it may or may not be the most natural fit for you—or you may have some reservations about Facebook and privacy issues. Before you proclaim an online home, ask yourself, Where do most of the people who will be receptive to your message hang out? That’s where you’ll want to be. That said, Moms Demand Action definitely had some learning to do about how to use Facebook for activism and not just social connection, specifically around what to make public versus what to keep private.

  Obviously, we have a public Facebook page where we share news articles about and statistics on gun violence, promote our initiatives (such as our recent Gun Sense Candidate tool that is our answer to the NRA’s rating system for political candidates), and encourage people who find our page to become active volunteers. But we learned pretty quickly that in addition to our public pages, we needed private Facebook pages, too, because gun extremists used our public posts to learn about upcoming events and then crash them—often while carrying long guns, as happened in Kentucky. Now, each state has its own private Facebook group, as do some of the larger cities. There are also private groups for Moms Demand Action leadership from all over the country to exchange ideas, share progress, and get support.

  In fact, Facebook is how I got connected to Sarah Brady, founder of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and wife of Jim Brady, the White House press secretary who was shot and disabled during the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan in 1981. Before she died in 2015, Sarah was an icon of the gun safety movement. I was thrilled when she friended me on Facebook, and pleasantly shocked when shortly thereafter she sent me a message saying, “You need to get a Twitter handle for your organization right away.” That’s how un-savvy I was about Twitter at the time—I needed someone from an older generation to encourage me to start using it.

  I’m so thankful for Sarah’s advice (and hope you’ll follow us: @MomsDemand). It was the right move because Twitter is more political than Facebook: politicians use Twitter to connect with their constituents in a quick and public way, and Americans use Twitter to keep up with politics. A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center showed that 14 percent of the public say they have changed their views about a political or social issue in the past year because of something they saw on social media.2 That can include the politicians themselves!

  Twitter and Facebook have remained the primary social media platforms for Moms Demand Action. But because we want to attract younger volunteers, too (and we’re proud of our partnership with Students Demand Action, which is led by high school and college students and grew from a pilot program into a full-fledged movement in the wake of the Parkland shooting), we’ve moved onto Instagram.

  Use Social Media to Be Bolder Than You Might Feel in Real Life

  Despite having basically no Twitter experience when I started Moms Demand Action, I’ve grown to love it. It’s emboldened me to be fearless and aggressive in ways that I rarely can manage in person. Twitter not only lets you share your opinions with a crowd even when you’re alone in your home (the dream for an introvert like me), it helps you hone your message and develop your persona in a way that would take months or even years of the more traditional method of writing press releases and waiting to be interviewed by media.

  When I first started using Twitter for Moms Demand Action, I kept my tweets pretty straightforward—sharing articles, thanking supportive lawmakers, and regurgitating our talking points. But during the run-up to the presidential election of 2016, I couldn’t help myself from getting more political. And it paid off: when I started using my own voice, I went from about twenty-five thousand followers to more than one hundred thousand in just a few months.

  I’ve found that taking a stand for something is rewarded by Twitter users: whenever I write a popular tweet, I get spikes in followers. For example, on December 29, 2015, I tweeted at then-presidential-candidate Trump’s spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson. She’d just been interviewed on CNN while wearing a necklace made of bullets, so I tweeted, “Surely Katrina Pierson [and I tagged her] wore a bullet necklace to recognize that 90 Americans die from gun violence every day.” By the time I woke up the next morning, she’d tweeted back, “Maybe I’ll wear a fetus next time & bring awareness to 50 million aborted people that will never get to be on Twitter.” I didn’t want or need to respond, but regardless, overnight I had several hundred new followers.

  More recently, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, I got into a heated Twitter discussion with NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, which started when she erroneously implied in a tweet that I wanted to ban all guns. She tweeted: “Moms Demand defines all guns as ‘assault weapons’ and wants to ban ‘assault weapons.’ You do the math,” and she attached a screenshot of an exchange we’d had five years earlier. She didn’t tag me or Moms Demand Action (the social media equivalent of talking behind someone’s back), but friends alerted me to her tweet.

  I tweeted back that she’d taken my tweet out of context—I’d been referring to how many rounds a gunman had just fired in a recent mass shooting. We then got into an hours-long back-and-forth where she kept asking me whether I wanted to ban all guns and I was asking her about the NRA’s close relationship with Russia. I’d learned a lot on Twitter in five years, and one lesson (something Dana is a master at) is that I don’t have to answer what someone asks me; I can create my own conversation about what I want to discuss.

  In the end, I had some tweets I’m still proud of (“Does the NRA take money from foreign entities like Russia? Answer like you’re explaining Quantum Leap to your grandma. We need to understand.”), and she ended up deleting several of her tweets.

  During our back-and-forth, people were tweeting me on, saying things like “Hey all, Shannon Watts is owning Dana Loesch in a
Friday night tweet-out. It’s better than a Friday night at the movies!”

  Our responses to one another were re-tweeted by thousands, and the discussion garnered a lot of attention. Over the course of the exchange, and thanks to a concerted campaign by Hillary Clinton staffer Adam Parkhomenko, who was encouraging his followers to follow me, I gained more than fifty thousand followers.

  Use Social Media to Encourage Corporate Responsibility

  One of the biggest companies we used social media to influence was, ironically, Facebook—the biggest platform of them all, as well as our birthplace. From the beginning, we’d had a good relationship with Facebook. In fact, when we first started garnering attention in early 2013, the sister of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Michelle, reached out to me to organize a meeting in Silicon Valley that Sheryl attended. She was very friendly and supportive, and I was grateful to have her wise counsel.

  But just a few months into doing this work, we realized that Facebook had become one of the largest online markets for unlicensed gun sales, and the platform often played a major role in getting guns into the hands of abusers, minors, and criminals.

  In January 2014, we couldn’t ignore the data anymore—we knew that if Facebook (and Instagram, which Facebook owned) changed its gun policies, lives would be saved. After all, Craigslist, eBay, and Google+ had already banned unlicensed gun sales on their platforms; we weren’t asking Facebook to do anything unprecedented. Without any restrictions on gun sales, Facebook and Instagram were essentially hosting online gun shows every day, twenty-four hours a day.

  Jenn Hoppe, our lead for corporate campaigns, had the ingenious idea of doing our own version of the ten-year look-back video that Facebook had recently released to celebrate the company’s first decade. Our version showed how specific shooters had gotten their guns online, including the perpetrator of a horrific 2012 shooting at a hair salon and spa in Wisconsin who had gotten his gun through Facebook. That information went viral, garnering attention worldwide.