Fight Like a Mother

by Shannon Watts

The truth is, people have a tendency to shoot at what scares them, and sadly, in the United States, that often means shooting at people who don’t fit the white, Christian, heterosexual mold, particularly black, brown, LGBTQ, Jewish, and Muslim Americans.

  As a white mom of five, I’ve never had to tell my children to be careful around law enforcement officers because if they make any “wrong” move, those officers might shoot them. I haven’t had to have “the talk” with them about how people may perceive them as a threat simply because of how they look, making them more likely to be shot. I haven’t prayed every time they left the house that they’d return home safely. I haven’t worried that they’d get shot in the streets of our neighborhood. Yet so many Americans face these realities every day.

  I had been blind to this truth until I immersed myself in the gun violence prevention movement. Seeing the data helped open my eyes: black men are sixteen times more likely than white men to be victims of gun homicides;1 black children and teens are fifteen times more likely to be the victims of gun homicides than white children and teens;2 black women are twice as likely to be fatally shot by an intimate partner compared with white women.3 And black Americans have to live with the very real possibility that any interaction with police could end disastrously: black men are three times more likely to be shot and killed by police officers than white men.4

  One of the police shootings of an unarmed African American that stuck with me the most is the story of Stephon Clark, a black father of two who was shot in March 2018 in his own backyard by Sacramento police. Police said they thought Stephon had a gun when they confronted him. But he was holding only a cell phone—no firearm was recovered from the scene.

  And it wasn’t just that he was shot in his own backyard; he was shot eight times. That is shooting to kill—not seeking to de-escalate the situation or use lesser force.

  Stephon’s grandmother said: “They didn’t have to kill him like that. They didn’t have to shoot him that many times. Why didn’t you shoot him in the arm? Shoot him in the leg? Send the dogs. Send the taser. Why?” Even months later, her simple question is in my mind: Why?

  Many black and brown people believe that our country’s toxic gun culture and implicit bias led to the death of Stephon Clark — and I agree. Stephon’s grandmother should not have to plead with law enforcement to “only” shoot black youth in their legs or arms. Black and brown mothers should not have to live in fear that their children will be shot because they are carrying a cell phone. Something is seriously wrong when this is the reality for entire communities.

  I have come to see, very clearly and without the slightest shred of doubt, that the fight for gun violence prevention is also a fight for equality. And one of the most powerful levers we at Moms Demand Action have available to us is to work on getting state stand-your-ground laws blocked, watered down, or repealed.

  Taking On Stand-Your-Ground Laws

  One of the most dangerous threats to people of color when it comes to gun violence are so-called stand-your-ground laws. These ordinances build on the centuries-old legal premise of self-defense—which supports the use of force to fend off an attack. One important component of self-defense has been to seek a way to de-escalate or avoid conflict or use a lesser degree of force whenever possible. The only exception to this “duty to retreat” was inside private homes, where it was legal for people to “stand their ground.” Meaning, if you are attacked in your home, you don’t have an obligation to try to de-escalate; you are within your rights to use deadly force first.

  Florida, which has earned the nickname the “Gunshine State” for its willingness to pass laws that support unfettered gun rights, passed a law in April 2005 that made the stand-your-ground principle apply in all public places. It was the first law of its kind, and it came straight from the NRA—its lobbyist, Marion Hammer (the woman who used to wear a red blazer until we claimed that color), was instrumental in its creation and passage.5 According to the law, Floridians don’t have a “duty to retreat” anywhere. No matter where they are, if they perceive a threat, they can shoot to kill.

  Stand your ground basically codifies a “shoot first, ask questions later” approach. And the result is devastating for communities of color. Research has found that in Florida, a defendant is twice as likely to be convicted in a stand-your-ground case if the victim is white than if the victim is not white.6 Across the country, if a white shooter kills a black victim, that shooting is eleven times more likely to be ruled “justifiable”—in other words, blameless—than if the shooter is black and the victim is white.7

  Stand your ground is the reason that George Zimmerman—who, on February 26, 2012, shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old whose only crime was walking down the street as a black person—was acquitted. The police in Sanford, Florida, where the shooting occurred, at first didn’t even file charges because, in the words of the city manager, “By Florida Statute, law enforcement was PROHIBITED from making an arrest based on the facts and circumstances they had at the time.”8

  The 2005 Florida stand-your-ground law was the first in the country, but it wasn’t the last—since then, twenty-four other states have followed suit.9 The law essentially gives regular citizens more authority to kill people than US soldiers in war zones, who are instructed to use “graduated measures of force,” and law enforcement officials, who are required to seek to de-escalate confrontations first and use deadly force only as a last resort.10

  When these laws are passed, legislators often give impassioned speeches about how the laws will reduce crime, but research has shown otherwise: A 2012 study by economists at Texas A&M University that analyzed FBI Uniform Crime Reports from 2000 to 2010 in states that had adopted stand-your-ground laws and those that hadn’t found no change in the number of burglaries and robberies in the stand-your-ground states. But they did find a statistically significant rise in all homicides—8 percent more, which may not sound like a lot until you consider that that means six hundred additional people killed in each stand-your-ground state.11 This law isn’t about saving lives; it’s about taking them—particularly black and brown lives—without any legal repercussions.

  As an advocate for change in our nation’s current gun climate, I, and every Moms Demand Action volunteer, have the duty to assist the effort to repeal these laws and prevent more being passed. So far, only one state, Louisiana, has repealed stand your ground. As I covered in Chapter 4, in 2017 Florida expanded stand your ground to make it easier for shooters to claim they were protecting themselves, and in 2018, a South Florida appeals court upheld the law’s constitutionality despite the best efforts of our Florida chapter.

  We did help to block the passage of a stand-your-ground bill in Utah in March 2018, and the two thousand signatures we delivered to Ohio lawmakers helped sway them to delay a vote on a similar bill in June of that same year. But we have so much more work to do. And we need to do it quickly, because hate crimes are on the rise.

  Gun-related hate crimes in the United States occurred more than 10,300 times a year from 2006 to 2015 — that’s more than twenty-eight each a day.12 More than half of them — 58 percent — are motivated by racism; more than 20 percent by bias against a religion, usually Judaism or Islam; and nearly 20 percent by prejudice against sexual orientation or gender identity.13

  Since 2015, the numbers of hate groups and hate crimes have increased; for example, anti-Muslim hate groups tripled in 2016.14 Similarly, incidents of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism, and assault climbed 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017 compared with the same period the year before.15 Additionally, 2017 was the deadliest year on record for the LGBTQ community in the United States, with an 86 percent increase in single incident reports of homicides of LGBTQ people compared with 2016.16 Transgender people are at particular risk, with twenty-nine killed in 2017, the most ever recorded, and twenty-six by November 2018—before the year was even over. A firearm was involved in more than half of these incidents.17


  This is why Moms Demand Action volunteers fight against dangerous legislation that would leave marginalized communities at even greater risk of experiencing gun violence, such as the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017—a reckless policy that would gut state gun laws regarding who can carry hidden, loaded guns in public. This law would make it easier for people with a history of hateful and violent behavior to carry hidden, loaded guns in public across the country and would leave people of color, LGBTQ people, and other minority groups even more vulnerable to targeted attacks with guns. To make matters worse, it also opens the door to more school shootings, as it would grant permitted gun owners the right to carry concealed weapons in school zones in any state, regardless of state laws.

  This is not an America I want to live in, or that I want my kids to grow up in. This law isn’t even about maintaining the status quo; it’s about reverting the country back to a twisted, retro version of the Wild West. This is where our cause gets even bigger, and more important. It’s not just about keeping our kids safe; it’s about creating an America that lives up to its ideals of being a land of equal opportunity—and that includes equal protection from the risk of being murdered.

  Since January 2017, when the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 was introduced, Moms Demand Action volunteers placed calls and collected and delivered thousands of postcards to their legislators opposing the bill. They attended town hall meetings and met with their elected officials. Despite these efforts, the bill did pass the House. But all that grassroots activism still paid off: 18 House members who had voted for the 2011 version of the bill voted against it in 2017; and in 2017, the bill passed by only a 33-vote margin, down from a 118-vote margin in 2011. This erosion of support essentially labeled the bill dead on arrival; a Senate version of the bill never made it to the floor for a vote. It’s just another example of the power of losing forward.

  Expanding Our Tent Through Collaboration and Support

  Of course, we have to do more than just focus on legislation to heal the uniquely American crisis that causes black and brown people to be more vulnerable to gun violence than white people. We have to fight the systemic racism that contributes to it, too. After all, gun violence doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s related to all kinds of issues—poverty (gun homicides are most prevalent in racially segregated neighborhoods with high rates of poverty),18 mass incarceration, a biased justice system. We also have to address gun violence in all its forms, including police shootings. And perhaps most doable and most important, we have to make sure that we’re not an organization of white ladies pushing for what we think black and brown communities need.

  We realized early on that the women who made up Moms Demand Action looked a lot like me—white and middle-aged. The fact that our membership was so unrepresentative of the people who are most affected by gun violence was morally wrong and strategically wrong, because if we truly wanted to move the needle on gun violence, we needed the perspective of people who face it at much higher rates. It was clear that we needed to work hard to have a more diverse staff and membership.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to Lucy McBath for helping Moms Demand Action become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. As a black woman, Lucy couldn’t help noticing that when she was performing her spokesperson duties for us, she was speaking mostly to white audiences. So she wrote me a very thoughtful and frank letter in which she said, “Even though I love and respect Moms Demand Action and am gratified to be speaking to so many people, we aren’t reaching the black community, and we aren’t speaking to the faith community, and it is bothering my spirit because to change the culture, we have to be speaking to everyone.” She also shared some of her ideas for how we could speak to more diverse audiences, and I am so thankful she did. I know it took a lot of courage. “I prayed when I sent that letter,” she recalls. She shouldn’t have been worried, though; I was grateful to receive it, and it was the perfect opportunity to ask her to join our staff and help us build the structures that make a bigger tent.

  We’ve made it a priority that the members and leaders of Moms Demand Action are inclusive and representative of all the different communities that are each uniquely affected by gun violence. For example, since 2017, more than 40 percent of the employees we’ve hired are nonwhite. A guiding principle we’ve used to help us in our efforts to diversify is to set what’s known as SMARTIE goals. You may have heard of SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Results-focused, and Time-bound. The I and the E in SMARTIE stand for Inclusive and Equitable. A SMART goal would be to say we want to hire twenty leaders in the next ninety days. If we did that, we’d probably end up with twenty leaders who look a lot like the leaders we already have. So we set a SMARTIE goal to hire twenty leaders in ninety days, five of whom speak Spanish.

  We also make it a point to hold implicit bias trainings at every level of membership, from our leaders down to our volunteers—otherwise, we’ll keep growing a volunteer and leadership base that continues to look a lot like the middle-aged white women who initially got our organization off the ground. It can be difficult to detect bias in your own actions, and to do so takes a willingness to admit that you’ve gotten something wrong. You may not even realize that you’re reaching out only to people who look a lot like you do. Especially when you’re a volunteer doing advocacy work in a limited amount of time, it’s all too easy to text only the people you have a personal connection with to invite them, and only them, to a meeting. You may not be intentionally excluding people from the group, but the result is still the same.

  Making room for more people under our tent requires a specific mindset to be successful. Lucy has been instrumental in helping us learn how to approach working with black communities. “For too long,” Lucy says, “white organizations have been coming into communities of color and acting like the savior—bringing their money and resources and dictating, ‘This is what we’re going to do for you,’ without even learning about what is happening and asking what is needed.” So we always seek to listen first.

  As Beth Sprunger, a volunteer from Indianapolis, puts it, “We are not here to save, we are here to support.” That means not charging in with an agenda, but rather asking what we can do to help, and then taking the direction. “Taking a back seat can be hard when you are used to running the show,” Beth admits. “But letting the people in the affected communities tell you what they need and then making it happen is the only way to foster a productive relationship.”

  Allison Mayne Peters, a volunteer from New York City, says it’s helpful to have a point person in your group take the lead on fostering connections to other groups. “We have one volunteer who attends every Gays Against Guns meeting and is our main point of contact with the LGBTQ community; another who focuses on reaching out to communities of color.” Having a point of contact makes interactions more personal. Of course, you also want that point person to bring other members to any events so that the connection grows. That’s why Allison says, “We show up en masse to any responses to shootings that happen in neighborhoods of color and to events that our point person puts on our radar.” When gun violence survivors have to attend the trial of their family member’s shooter, the local Moms Demand Action chapter arranges a “court support” team that attends the trial every day in a show of solidarity and to remind the judge and jury that this is about more than just one shooting death. Showing up is a strategy that pays off. “We have seen so many people from the communities we support come to our meetings, phone bank, and canvass,” Allison says. It’s proof that we are definitely stronger together.

  One thing we’ve found is that we continually need to be on the lookout for more populations that we have inadvertently been insensitive to; it takes continual training to raise your awareness and a willingness to observe, listen, and admit when you’ve gotten something wrong. For instance, Justine Emily, from the Washington state chapter, says: “I never gave the accessibility of our meetings any thought until I met a volunteer with a vi
sible physical disability. Now I make sure all our meeting locations are ADA compliant.”

  Another often overlooked demographic in any movement is people in their seventies or older. Jenny Stadelmann of the Illinois chapter reports that it took several months for her chapter to accommodate a passionate group of grandparents. Finally, the chapter held a new member meeting at the clubhouse of a retirement community; forty seniors showed up. “It was one of the most engaged, informed, and motivated groups of any people at any meeting I’ve ever attended,” Jenny says. Since then, the local group leaders have started calling these members (since many of them don’t use social media or even email) and arranging carpools to the monthly meetings (since many no longer drive). “It has really provided more diversity to our group.”

  Diversity doesn’t happen overnight, though, and it’s not set-it-and-forget-it, either. After our massive influx of post-Parkland volunteers—many of whom were women who look like me—we had to start our diversity work all over again. In truth, our work to be more inclusive and diverse will never be done; if we don’t keep focusing on it, at some point we’ll look up and realize we’ve gone backward.

  Reaching Out Across the Aisle

  Our efforts to build a bigger tent apply not just to volunteers, but also to lawmakers. After all, to change laws, you have to change lawmakers. You can do that in two ways: vote them out or change their minds. Frankly, it will take too long to vote out every legislator who is opposed to any kind of commonsense gun laws. And since our goal is to save lives, we don’t have time to wait.

  This means that we have to consciously engage lawmakers who have a track record of supporting the NRA’s agenda. And to do that we need to keep a door open to people on the other side of the issue with the expectation that they’ll walk through it.

  This is not just a hope or a wish. I’ve seen so many people—regular folks, corporate leaders, legislators—staunchly opposed to any kind of gun regulation change their minds and start supporting our cause. If we wrote off everyone who appears to be our enemy, that conversion wouldn’t happen nearly as often; we’d just stay entrenched on our respective sides.