Fight Like a Mother

by Shannon Watts

  The fact is, politicians do change their minds. Tim Ryan, once an NRA A-rated Democratic representative from Ohio, started rethinking his position on gun safety after the Sandy Hook shooting. Then, in October 2017, after the shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas, he donated $20,000—the same amount of the campaign contributions he had received from the NRA—to gun violence prevention groups, including Everytown. That same month, Minnesota state representative Tim Walz followed suit and donated the $18,950 he’d received from the NRA to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund and pledged his support for universal background check legislation and his opposition to laws that would make it legal to cross state lines with a concealed weapon. Even Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic US senator from New York who has made a name for herself as a leader of the progressive resistance since Trump’s election, once earned an A-rating from the NRA as a US representative from a rural district in upstate New York (she’s more recently earned the NRA’s F-rating—good for her!).

  The winds of politics also change direction. As recently as 2012, the Democratic National Committee advised candidates running in rural districts to show in their campaign ads photos and footage of themselves handling guns.19 Fast forward to now, and Democrats are making commonsense gun regulation a key part of their platform. Take, for example, Arizona Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick, who received an A-rating from the NRA during her successful 2010 bid for a congressional seat; during her campaign, she talked openly about hunting with her grandfather. In 2018, she talked about how she gave away those hunting rifles, and she came out as a supporter of universal background checks and an assault weapons ban.

  Of course, we still work hard to replace those lawmakers who don’t support laws designed to reduce gun violence with candidates who do. But it’s often a faster path to work with current lawmakers and seek to build relationships with them via in-person conversations and to use phone calls, emails, and social media posts to let them know that we’re watching and will hold them accountable for their votes.

  Many times you just don’t know where lawmakers truly stand until you engage them in conversations. That’s what some new Moms Demand Action volunteers from Massachusetts discovered when they scheduled a meeting in 2018 with their local Republican lawmakers to discuss the benefits of a red flag bill that was winding its way through the state legislature. At the meeting, the volunteers pointed out the many ways that red flag laws have been shown to save lives. And to their surprise, the lawmakers said they would support it. It turns out, these legislators had been assuming that their constituents were happy with their position on gun laws, because they hadn’t heard from any voters directly. After that meeting, the bill passed and was eventually signed into law (and by a Republican governor, no less!).

  Consider that these were new volunteers who had joined Moms Demand Action only a few months earlier after the Parkland shooting. They weren’t seasoned negotiators; they didn’t know how to play any political games. They simply showed up and asked.

  Fred and Maria Wright, whose son Jerry was killed in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, have been incredible assets in demonstrating how to work with politicians of all affiliations. Fred and Maria live outside of Miami; they’re both moderate Republicans and lifelong Catholics. Maria grew up with guns in her home, and she and Fred are both proponents of the Second Amendment; but even before their son was murdered, they supported stronger background check laws. After Jerry was killed, passing stronger laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people became their number one focus.

  The Pulse shooter had been investigated twice by the FBI on suspicion of being linked to terrorist organizations, but he was still able to legally purchase the guns he used to kill forty-nine people—a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun—only a week before he attacked.

  “After our son was killed, we said, ‘This is our calling,’” Fred recalls. And Maria adds, “We knew we had to do whatever we can to help people see that it can happen in any family, to make it so that other parents never have to go through this.” Within a month of the shooting, Fred and Maria were in Washington, DC, meeting with lawmakers and speaking to crowds.

  Fast forward to now, and Fred and Maria are the legislative leads in Florida for Moms Demand Action. In their roles, they meet with politicians at all levels, of all parties. In Florida, “the NRA’s petri dish,” as Maria refers to it, they have their work cut out for them. Their position as parents whose son was killed by gun violence and the facts that they are Republicans, Christians, and Hispanic make them uniquely suited to be able to speak with a wide variety of people on the issue of gun violence; but they have lessons to share for those who want to know how to have constructive conversations with politicians on the other side of the issue.

  The first is to keep the conversation on a human level and not view it as a battle. “When you go in ready to attack, that makes it very hard to hear each other,” Maria says. She and Fred show respect from the get-go by being polite to the lawmaker’s aides when seeking to arrange a meeting, and dressing up when they do meet. “We always walk in with a photo of Jerry,” Maria says. “We put it on the table as soon as we start. We tell them a little bit about him to show that we’re not there for a specific political agenda. Then we say we can no longer protect our child, but we don’t want other families to go through what we went through. At the end we always, always thank them for giving us the opportunity to honor our child.”

  “Usually, even though we might not get to agreement, we do get to conversation,” Fred says. Yet sometimes they surprise even themselves with the impact they have.

  When the US House of Representatives was due to vote on the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, Fred and Maria set out to have conversations with their local representatives, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo. They began by reaching out to the reps’ aides (“Be really, really nice to the aides,” Maria counsels), who then worked to set up in-person meetings. It was proving more difficult to find a time to meet with Representative Ros-Lehtinen until one of her aides revealed that she’d be attending a party at a friend’s house. Maria recalls: “Fred and our daughter literally crashed the party and talked to her about the bill in front of her friends and husband, explaining how the bill would make the weakest gun laws in a given state the law of the land. Everyone at the party was saying, ‘Ileana, you cannot vote for that!’” They also brought groups of Moms Demand Action volunteers to a meeting with Representative Curbelo. And both of the legislators voted “no”—the only two Republicans from the South to do so. The bill still passed the House, but the advocacy of Fred and Maria has helped send the message that this isn’t the slam dunk the NRA expected it to be.

  Fred and Maria have even made inroads with people when it seemed like there would be no hope of finding middle ground—people like Florida senator Marco Rubio, an NRA A-rated Republican. “He has met with us face to face, and he responds thoughtfully to our emails,” Fred says. “We’ve at least gotten him to discuss magazine capacity, red flag laws, and other issues, where before he wouldn’t have even thought about it.” One important place where Fred and Maria have agreed with Senator Rubio is on the need for more research on gun violence (after the government banned the CDC from studying it by denying their funding).

  But Fred and Maria won’t stop there. “We’ll soon ask for another face-to-face meeting where we can discuss several things with him and find that middle ground where we can all be safer without taking guns away,” Fred says. “We’re going to keep trying.”

  Working with Our So-Called Enemies

  Because our country is so divided, partisan politics is one of the biggest barriers to building a big tent. But being inclusive means we need to be able to find common ground with people who don’t see things the way we do. Our efforts to diversify Moms Demand Action and raise awareness around implicit bias have been met by our volunteers with open arms. What’s been a harder sell is actively seeking to work with people who do
n’t fit the progressive liberal ideological mold.

  We have supported plenty of candidates—with donations, activism, and Gun Sense Candidate distinctions—whom many of our predominantly Democratic members strongly oppose. In 2016, we endorsed Pat Toomey, a conservative Republican senator from Pennsylvania who frequently votes to curtail many of the things that progressives hold dear—including reproductive rights, environmental protections, and the Affordable Care Act. But when he stuck his neck out to co-sponsor the Manchin-Toomey bill to close the loophole on background checks, we promised he would have our support when he ran again for office. That was not a popular move among some of our Pennsylvania volunteers. But as long as Toomey stands with us on gun violence prevention, we will stand with him.

  A particularly controversial incident happened in 2015 when Lucy McBath appeared in a documentary called The Armor of Light with the Reverend Rob Schenck, a fixture of the political right and staunch opponent of a woman’s right to choose. In the early 1990s, Reverend Schenck was part of Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion group that protested outside abortion clinics and tried to block women’s access. He was even arrested once for confronting women with an aborted fetus. He’s also an evangelical Christian—many of whom believe that the Bible supports unrestricted gun rights. One look at his résumé would likely convince anyone that he would never be someone whom Moms Demand Action could consider an ally.

  Then, in 2013, Schenck witnessed a mass shooting in his own neighborhood in Washington, DC, where twelve people died in an attack at the Navy Yard. Shortly after, he met Lucy (who is also an evangelical Christian), and, as he recalled in an NPR interview, he “saw her heart, her eyes, the pain in her mother’s soul.”20 While I’m sure there were other events that led to Reverend Schenck’s changing his thinking about guns, meeting Lucy caused him to challenge his views. He struggled to reconcile his, and his church’s, pro-life beliefs with simultaneously supporting a proliferation of guns, and unfettered access to them.

  The Armor of Light documented Schenck’s efforts to get the evangelical community to reconsider its stance on guns alongside Lucy’s struggle to process her grief and advocate for commonsense gun laws. Having a visible Moms Demand Action spokeswoman collaborating with someone with such conservative (and anti-choice) political views did not go over well with some of our volunteers. In fact, we lost some of the volunteer leadership of our Nashville group because of it. And although I understand why they were upset, we are an organization dedicated to reducing gun violence. Reverend Schenck, for all his other views that we may not agree with, shares that dedication. He’s a conduit to a population that is generally uninterested in our views, and for the access he provides, Moms Demand Action is thankful.

  Stephanie Mannon Grabow, a current member of our national training team and former chapter leader in Indiana—a very red state—is a great example of how our cause has reached out to faith communities. Stephanie is a woman of faith who grew up with guns in her home, enjoys sport shooting, and has a history of being a moderate Republican—she was a staff member for a Republican state administrator, is a graduate of a Republican women’s leadership program, and ran a congressional campaign for a Republican candidate. In her work to grow Moms Demand Action in Indiana, Stephanie has reached out to religious communities and asked whether she could speak to the congregants. “Meeting in a place of worship helps neutralize the political discussion and has given us a way to engage people at a heart level and a moral level that we might not have been able to do if we’d gone into the public library and talked about facts and figures,” Stephanie says. “If they’re regularly attending services, they already believe that showing up is important. We engage them and say, ‘You can show up over here too.’ That’s really been our secret sauce” to growing an engaged membership in a red state.

  Stephanie has also been a leader to us in how to bridge the red state–blue state political divide. Like me, Stephanie became engaged in reducing gun violence after Sandy Hook. At the time of the shooting, her son was also in first grade. “I remember that day so well,” she recalls. “I still can’t talk about it without crying.” Stephanie saw my Facebook page, but she didn’t join right away. She was, after all, working full time, traveling a lot for her work, and raising a young child. It wasn’t until the NRA held its 2014 national convention in Indianapolis and an acquaintance invited her to attend the gun lobby’s women’s leadership luncheon that things changed for her. “This woman assumed because of my background and political work that I was interested in supporting the NRA,” Stephanie remembers. “I was mortified that she thought that I would want to have anything to do with the organization that helped create the conditions that led to Sandy Hook. And I knew in that moment that my silence had been interpreted as support. I decided that I was never going to let anyone ever wonder again where I stood on this issue. I joined Moms Demand Action on that day.”

  In the early days of Moms Demand Action, Stephanie had to help us recognize how our language sometimes made us culturally unwelcoming to conservatives or Republicans; saying things like “We’re going to turn Indiana blue!” would turn off a conservative, who would never be seen again. It’s far more effective to stick to the issue—to say instead, “We’re going to get more gun-sense candidates elected!”

  When it comes to building bridges with Republican lawmakers and conservative community leaders, Stephanie says she tries to bring a survivor with her who can share a story that relates to that leader’s constituency. “When we met with the assistant chief of police in Indianapolis,” Stephanie recalls, “we brought a domestic violence survivor whose ex-husband and son had both killed themselves with guns and a mother whose child had been devastatingly injured by a stray bullet. We’d been trying to get a meeting with the police for months, and I couldn’t even get my phone calls returned. When we finally got in the room with him, he ended up meeting with us for forty-five minutes, then later got us in to meet the chief.” Now the Indianapolis group is partnering with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department to distribute gun locks to the community. “It’s a slow growth process that pays off in big ways.”

  Jenny Stadelmann, who lives in the northern suburbs of Chicago where the numbers of Republicans and Democrats are about equal, says her local group started to be more careful about the language they used at Moms Demand Action meetings after a diversity, equity, and inclusion training for our volunteer leaders. “I began starting each meeting with ground rules that emphasized that we are nonpartisan, that we will disagree on many political issues within our group and that’s okay, because we are brought together for one very important reason: gun violence prevention,” Jenny says. After instituting the new ground rules, Jenny reached out to some folks who identified as Republican or Independent and had attended previous meetings but hadn’t returned. Many came to another meeting, noticed the change in climate, and reported that they felt more welcome. “It takes some redirecting when people at meetings wade into other political territory,” Jenny says. “I encourage them to take those issues to other groups and focus on what we do agree on, which is a lot.”

  I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that many Moms Demand Action supporters identify as Democrats, but I think you might be surprised to know how many of them don’t—we’re also Republicans and Independents and Libertarians, and sometimes a mix of all the parties when you break things down issue by issue. We come together primarily to do gun violence prevention work, but the outcome of doing all our work to be diverse, equitable, and inclusive is to be able to bring people together who are very different and work together on a shared goal around a shared value. It’s the opposite of what the NRA is trying to do, which is to pit Americans against one another. We’re seeking any amount of common ground we can find in any number of different groups of people to work toward something that benefits everyone. It’s not just what we need to reduce gun violence; it’s good democracy. It’s also exactly what we need to pull ourselves out of th
is us-versus-them downward spiral.

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  Let This Mother Run This Mother

  Once volunteers and gun violence survivors join Moms Demand Action, it doesn’t take long for them to realize that many of the lawmakers who represent them aren’t exactly rocket scientists. The more time you spend at city council meetings or statehouse hearings, the more you realize that our nation’s patchwork quilt of laws has been sewn together mostly by men who are more interested in power and perks than policy.

  I know because I’ve seen it myself, and it’s fair to say I wouldn’t trust all that many of them to make me a cup of coffee, let alone make the laws responsible for ensuring the safety of my family and community.

  Amber Gustafson, a Moms Demand Action volunteer turned candidate—she ran for the Iowa Senate in 2018, a race she unfortunately lost (although she has her eye on another seat that will be opening in 2022 and is currently working on nonprofit boards to find a home for the fundraising and networking skills she honed on the campaign trail)—had a similar realization: “I always assumed that elected officials were super smart people with tons of skills. Once I started getting involved with Moms Demand Action and spending time at the capitol, I realized how many of them simply did not have their crap together and should not be making decisions that affected other people.”

  There are also plenty of lawmakers who, regardless of how intelligent they are, clearly don’t care about their constituents’ concerns. Christy Clark, a Moms Demand Action volunteer who ran for and won a seat as state representative in North Carolina in 2018, recalls how her work as a gun violence prevention activist led to her meeting people from both sides of the aisle: “Some were wonderful and great, and some just weren’t—they didn’t care if they received phone calls from ten thousand of their constituents asking them not to support a gun bill; they voted for it anyway. On top of that, some of them were mean and threatening to our volunteers—certainly not the kind of people you would want running your state.”