We also asked our followers to post comments on the public pages of Facebook and Instagram and to tweet and post on their own feeds using the hashtag #EndFacebookGunShows. They also shared graphics showing the alarming statistics of how many unlicensed gun sales take place in the United States (a survey of gun retailers by the City of New York found that private gun sellers suspect that 62 percent of the people buying online wouldn’t be able to pass a background check) and the strong tie between criminal activity and unlicensed gun sales (another survey of incarcerated firearm offenders found that nearly 40 percent of them were legally barred by either state or federal laws from owning a gun, and 96 percent of that group had procured their guns from a supplier that was not required to conduct a background check).3 We were weaponizing social media in order to get illegal weapons off of social media.
Within a month of launching our Facebook campaign, we began having formal talks with Facebook executives about the implications of the company’s policies. During that time, a fifteen-year-old boy took a gun he had bought through Facebook to his high school homecoming game; and a felon was arrested in Storm Lake, Iowa, for possessing a gun he had bought through Facebook. We publicized these two incidents, which helped draw attention to the very real threat Facebook’s gun policies posed.
On March 5, 2014, Facebook announced nine new policies around gun sales: most important, the company agreed to delete reported posts offering guns for sale without a background check and to no longer show gun ads to people younger than eighteen. It also agreed to force people who search hashtags such as #Guns4Sale on Instagram to acknowledge their state laws before seeing search results. It was an important start, but the policies didn’t go far enough.
We kept the pressure on by providing Facebook with a report showing how domestic abusers were getting access to guns through its platform. Finally, in February 2016, Facebook announced that it would no longer allow any unlicensed gun sales on its platforms, including Instagram. In May 2017, after a murder in Cleveland, Ohio, had been broadcast live on Facebook the month before, the company hired three thousand additional employees to review and remove any content that conflicted with company policy—including advertisements for unlicensed gun sales. Unfortunately, when it comes to stamping out unlicensed gun sales via Facebook, it isn’t “set it and forget it.” It requires constant vigilance, and Moms Demand Action is proud of our role in keeping Facebook on its toes to prevent needless gun deaths and to review and refine its policies.
Use Social Media to Turn Cultural Conversations into Policy Progress
We’ve also combined our purchasing power with our social media reach to influence national retailers and restaurants to either enforce existing gun policies or create new ones. Although individual companies were our targets, we were going after something much broader—a cultural shift that brought attention to open carry. And we did it by building on the success we’d had with influencing Starbucks to ban guns in its stores.
In 2014 we launched a number of campaigns to get other large restaurants and retailers to follow suit. We never would have been able to be as effective, or as quick, in this effort without social media.
After Starbucks changed its policy, gun extremists, particularly in Texas, went on the offensive: they organized meet-ups in several different businesses where dozens to hundreds of people would show up, armed to the teeth with semiautomatic rifles, in a flaunting display and exploitation of open carry laws.
The first such event happened at a Jack in the Box in the Dallas–Ft. Worth area when members of a gun extremist group called Open Carry Texas walked into the restaurant carrying long guns. The employees were so scared that they locked themselves inside a walk-in freezer. We issued a press release, launched an online petition (we helped spread the word about the petition through Facebook ads that featured a shareable graphic—because on social media images garner even more attention than words), and tweeted photos, with the hashtag #JackedUp, of our members eating at other fast-food restaurants that had safer gun policies. Within days the company announced it would begin enforcing its policy of no guns inside its restaurants.
After that, there were similar incidents at Chipotle, Chili’s, and Sonic Drive-In. And each time we led with the trifecta of a press release, a petition, and a catchy hashtag. For Chipotle it was #BurritosNotBullets; for Chili’s, #RibsNotRifles; and for Sonic, #ShakesNotShotguns—and we asked our members to attach the hashtag to pics of themselves eating at competitor restaurants that had better gun-sense policies in place. During each campaign, we got thousands of signatures each day, hundreds of photos popped up all over the companies’ social media feeds, and the media wrote stories about the campaign. It generally took just a couple of days for the restaurants to change their policies. (That’s the other thing about social media; it can make things move very quickly.)
Of course, we wanted to counter the efforts of gun extremists. But these were more than tactical moves in the gun safety marathon. Allowing anyone to open carry a gun inside a restaurant or a store where we take our kids puts the onus on customers to figure out who the good guy is. Forty-five states allow the open carry of loaded, semiautomatic rifles in public—and most of those states don’t require a permit or gun safety lock to do so. Combined with the estimate that 22 percent of all gun sales take place without a background check in the United States, this means that people in most states can legally carry rifles openly in public without ever having passed a criminal background check.
When you see someone in public with a gun, it’s impossible to know whether that person is a good guy or a bad guy. Businesses everywhere have a duty to protect their employees and patrons, but even more so in states where no background checks or training is required to buy and carry guns in public. Businesses also have a duty to listen to the very legitimate concerns about the safety of their customers. Remember, American women make 80 percent of the spending decisions for their families. Businesses ignore us at their peril.
A modern proverb says, “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.” Social media help ensure that women have a seat at the table, particularly at tables within corporate boardrooms (remember that less than 1 percent of Fortune 1000 CEOs are women).
We knew we were affecting major cultural change when Panera Bread Company executives came to us proactively in 2014 to help them modify the company’s gun policies—soon after, they announced that guns were no longer allowed inside the eighteen hundred Panera restaurants in forty states.
A company that took longer to change its policies—although it ultimately did, which is the most important thing—was Target. Gun extremists staged several open carry demonstrations inside Target stores in Texas, Alabama, Ohio, North Carolina, Washington, Wisconsin, and Virginia, yet Target’s management was silent—this despite the fact that the company acknowledges that 80 to 90 percent of its customers are female and 38 percent of its shoppers have children, a share the company boasts is higher than any other discount store.
Moms have a deep bond with Target. It’s where so many of us buy school supplies, groceries, trash bags, towels, and clothes for our kids, and may throw a cute pair of pajamas or some yoga pants in the cart for ourselves. It’s our haven—except for when hundreds of angry gun-rights activists trying to prove a point are milling around the parking lot with semiautomatic rifles.
In early June 2014, Moms Demand Action launched a social media campaign using the hashtag #OffTarget, and we encouraged women to shop at other retailers and use the hashtag when posting pictures of themselves and/or the things they bought at Target’s competitors. We also designed a printable sign that read “Don’t make my family a target,” which hundreds of moms tweeted along with photos of their families.
Our petition asking Target to change its policies garnered more than twenty-five thousand signatures in fewer than forty-eight hours. Still the company said nothing. Even after a loaded gun was found in the toy aisle of a Target in Myrtle Beach, S
outh Carolina—employees found it and reported it to authorities, but there easily could have been a much more tragic outcome—Target stayed quiet.
A month later, after our sustained campaign encouraged nearly four hundred thousand Americans to sign our petition asking Target to ban open carry in its stores, the company announced: “Starting today we will also respectfully request that guests not bring firearms to Target—even in communities where it is permitted by law. . . . This is a complicated issue, but it boils down to a simple belief: Bringing firearms to Target creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping and work experience we strive to create.”
Yes! In addition to being relieved that American families will be safer now when shopping at Target, I think I speak for pretty much each of our hundreds of thousands of volunteers when I say that I’m thrilled that I get to keep shopping there! It’s hard to imagine mom life without Target.
Use Social Media to Draw Attention to the Good Guys
It’s important to note that social media is also a great venue for publicly thanking companies that take important steps to promote gun safety. That’s exactly what we did when, shortly after the Parkland shooting in early 2018, Dick’s Sporting Goods announced it would stop selling assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and raise the age limit for buying guns in its stores to twenty-one. Then, in September 2018, Levi Strauss CEO Chip Bergh announced that the company would establish the Safer Tomorrow Fund with a $1 million gift and use those funds to support nonprofits and youth activists who are working to reduce gun violence. The company also committed to doubling the donations its employees made to organizations affiliated with the Safer Tomorrow Fund and became a founding member of Everytown Business Leaders for Gun Safety in order to encourage other senior executives to support commonsense gun reform. Moms Demand Action thanked Levi Strauss and Chip Bergh, too.
We’ve also had multiple occasions to thank Walmart—after the company stopped selling assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in its stores in 2015, and again when it raised the age limit for buying a gun to twenty-one in 2018. Walmart still allows open carry inside its stores, but give us some time. The company has been a force for gun sense in many other ways. In 2008 it was the first large gun retailer to adopt a ten-point code of conduct in partnership with Mayors Against Illegal Guns (another partner under the Everytown for Gun Safety umbrella). And its background check policies have been more stringent than even those of the federal government. Since 2002, Walmart has had an official policy of not selling a gun to someone who doesn’t have a fully cleared national background check, even though federal law allows gun dealers to sell a gun to someone whose background check hasn’t cleared after three days. This is what’s technically known as a “default proceed,” but more commonly known as the “Charleston loophole.” That’s because the mass shooter who killed nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 was able to purchase his gun even though the system had not issued a determination on his background check by the end of the federally mandated waiting period of three business days.
Not all of our social media campaigns have been what is traditionally considered “successful.” We’ve also targeted Kroger’s, Home Depot, and Staples, and none of them has, at the time of this writing, changed its gun policies. But it is still important that we try, because we can lose forward. Our campaigns alert companies’ customers—many of whom care about gun safety—about store policies, as well as about state laws that allow stores to have these policies. They also give us an opportunity to tell people where they can shop instead, and let us send a little love to companies with gun sense.
Use Social Media to Speak Truth to Power
Using social media is certainly not all about picking fights. We also use them to amplify others’ voices and draw attention to issues we care about that aren’t getting the media attention we feel they deserve. Gun violence rarely makes the national news unless a white person is killed; we use social media with our audience to do our part to raise awareness of all the ways gun violence impacts marginalized communities.
We share stories about gun violence in cities and share the posts and tweets of people of color whose voices aren’t being captured by mainstream media. Any time a police officer shoots an unarmed person of color, we go online and share the data that show you can’t talk about gun violence without also talking about the systemic racism that can lead to it. We also share stories about gun violence against trans and gender-nonconforming communities, which mainly affects black trans women. There’s no national tracking of gun violence against black trans women, so Everytown for Gun Safety bases its data on news reports and accurate reporting of the gender identity of victims.
Another example of using social media to bring about change is how we have strategically gone after the empty sentiments of politicians offering “thoughts and prayers.” At some point in 2015, after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, I just couldn’t bear to hear those words one more time—and I wasn’t alone. Moms Demand Action volunteers and so much of the American public were right there with me. “Thoughts and prayers” are often a direct result of the NRA’s insistence that it isn’t appropriate to talk about changing gun laws in the days right after a national shooting tragedy, so instead of discussing solutions, politicians on both sides of the debate are left with merely sending their thoughts and prayers.
I started using my Twitter feed to point out how gun laws had contributed to each particular shooting—maybe the shooter was a known danger to himself and others, or maybe he had a history of domestic violence, but law enforcement couldn’t take away his guns because there wasn’t a red flag law on the books in that state. And I’d point out how the NRA was complicit in the shooting via its efforts to weaken specific gun laws. And our volunteers and supporters used their social media platforms to amplify how each individual lawmaker was offering thoughts and prayers without the promise of change, which wasn’t nearly enough to stop the next shooting. Sharing facts with a few million people is a great way to stymie hypocrisy.
But please know that I’m not mocking thoughts or prayers. I’ve offered them myself to survivors and families after every national shooting tragedy. It’s just that without action, thoughts and prayers are all but meaningless. Even the Bible, in James 2:17, says, “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” In this case, the action of lawmakers should be fighting for legislation that has been proved to reduce gun violence and save lives.
Managing the Downsides—Trolls, Flameouts, and Outright Mistakes
As useful as social media undoubtedly are, they also come with their own set of land mines, including a plethora of trolls. I’ve already talked about the hateful comments our Facebook posts have garnered; I was surprised to learn that civility is often even lower on Twitter. When I first started my personal Twitter handle, I was completely taken by surprise at just how mean-spirited many of the comments I got were. People would post images of my face Photoshopped onto a naked body. Or they would make up lies about my personal and professional lives, commenting on my marriage, my parenting, or my job history. In the beginning, I responded to these attacks, which is the worst thing you can do because it almost always turns into a pointless, never-ending online argument. Now I live by the mantra “Don’t feed the trolls.”
Most of the time, trolls don’t care what you have to say; they live only to belittle you or to engage in a fight. But if you get trolled online and think the comments may have a thread of truth to them, do a little research. Weigh how many followers commenters have, check to see whether they’re verified, and then read their profile bios to better understand what they care about. They’re most likely gun extremists who will never agree with you, but if they volunteer in your organization or work on your same cause, or if they are influential or verified, you should take their comments seriously.
For the most part, the mean-spirited attacks on social media have become white nois
e to me; they hardly register anymore. As I mentioned, we have volunteers whose sole job is to block trolls; because your feed is the online equivalent of your house, you don’t have to let hostile people in. Or as someone on Twitter once put it: this hellscape is optional. (There’s also a “mute” function on Twitter, which, frankly, I don’t find valuable; I just block and move on.)
You may get pushback for blocking trolls—I’ve blocked so many people that the hashtag #ImBlockedByShannonWatts once trended on Twitter. But if you know how to use them, social media are great at empowering you to take back the narrative. When that hashtag popped, I went and found some of the most offensive things people had written about me on Twitter and re-tweeted them using that same hashtag so my followers could see why I needed to use the block function so frequently. It helped me become part of the conversation instead of simply the butt of a joke, which was why the hashtag had been started in the first place—to troll me.
I also trended once after I tweeted, “You guys the NRA says I’m an unhinged wolf because I advocate for background checks on every gun sale.” (Why do so many troll insults make no sense?) The NRA wrote back, “Looks like another Shannon Watts tantrum is brewing” and included the hashtag #ShannonWattsTantrum. This was meant to be something its own supporters would run with. The only problem is, the NRA’s base is made up of older men who don’t know how to use social media very well. The hashtag took off, but only because my followers, allies, and Moms Demand Action volunteers ran with it. Emerge Colorado—a state chapter of the national organization whose board I am on and that offers training and support to women who want to run for elected office—tweeted, “If having a tantrum means you’re a woman getting shit done, then bring it. #ShannonWattsTantrum.” Social media also help you grow an online grassroots army that will not only support your cause, but also have your back.
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