Top Quotes: “Fight like a Mother: How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World” — Shannon Watts

“I thought there had to be some kind of organization already in existence — like a Mothers Against Drunk Driving for gun violence prevention. But all I found were small state organizations working on local gun violence issues — which had made important strides but didn’t add up to the nationwide grassroots army I was envisioning — and a handful of think tanks in Washington, DC, most of which were run and staffed by men.”

“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.”

“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”

“82%: The percentage of worldwide gun deaths that happen in the United States.

4%: The percentage of the worldwide population that resides in the United States.”

“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.”

“Along the way, we’ve taken our kids with us when it makes sense — sometimes out of necessity, sometimes as a strategy, and sometimes as both. One of our first and most effective tactics to encourage resistant lawmakers to meet with us is to hold “stroller jams.” Stroller jams originated in Maryland, where then-governor Martin O’Malley introduced background check legislation after Congress failed to pass Manchin-Toomey. During the run-up to the vote, our volunteers met with lawmakers and took their kids along. With all the strollers and car seats, the halls of the Maryland statehouse were packed. As a result, lawmakers didn’t have any room to maneuver past us; they had to stop and talk to us.

It was a crystallizing moment. After the Maryland bill passed, Governor O’Malley thanked our organization publicly, which gave us a lot of credibility and put us on the map as moms and as a political force. Now we use stroller jams in the halls of Congress, at state legislatures, and at the in-district offices of congressional representatives — even on public transportation.”

“Having that huge fear fall away has taught me so clearly that whatever scares you loses its power once you just start doing it.”

“Sometimes, speaking up is more about being vulnerable than it is about being tough. You may not feel like a badass if your voice and hands are shaking or your knees are knocking, but you absolutely are.

A perfect example of this happened in early 2018 when Moms Demand Action volunteers in Annapolis, Maryland, showed up at a rally to support a bill to take guns away from people who had been convicted of domestic violence. At first, a group of gun-rights activists who said they were there on behalf of the NRA heckled them. But then something astonishing happened. Former police officer Angela Wright shared her story about how her abusive husband used to torture her by forcing her to play Russian roulette with a loaded gun.

Standing at the mic, Angela said, “I would often wake up in the middle of the night or in the morning with the sound of ‘spin, click, spin, click’ as he played Russian roulette with a gun to the back of my neck.” She went on to tell how one day her husband came at her with a gun with the intention not just to scare her but to kill her. She called 911, and her former colleagues arrived in time to save her life. The NRA crowd was quiet.

Angela didn’t shout, didn’t throw witty jabs at anyone. She simply shared her story. Her bravery inspired the Moms Demand Action volunteers in attendance to walk up to the NRA supporters after the talk was over and open a dialogue.

Captain Tyrone Collington, commander of the nearby Takoma Park Police Department, was one of the Moms Demand Action volunteers who instigated that conversation. A military veteran, Captain Collington was shot twice before he joined the force when he tried to stop a murder in his neighborhood. He nearly bled to death. “We walked over to introduce ourselves to the group so that we could give them a clear understanding of what we were trying to achieve so that they didn’t think we were trying to take away their guns,” he says. “I told them I’d been in the military for twenty-two years and have been around guns all my life; in fact I’d just purchased an off-duty weapon. This effort wasn’t about restricting the Second Amendment, it was about keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people.” As a police officer, Captain Collington also shared how domestic abuse calls are the most common situations officers respond to, and also, when the domestic abuser is armed, the most likely source of officers being killed in the line of duty.

It worked. The NRA supporters changed their tune. One of the men was quoted in the local media as saying, “We support the moms in this. We are all against domestic abusers. We believe they’re criminals. They shouldn’t have handguns, or guns of any kind.”

By the end of April 2018, the Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, had signed several bills that revamped the state’s gun laws: one that banned bump stocks, which essentially turn semiautomatic rifles into automatic weapons; one that instituted a red flag law, which makes it easier to temporarily remove guns from someone who is armed and appears to be a danger to themselves or others; and one that allowed law enforcement officers to remove the guns owned by people who are under a restraining order, even before their convictions. And after he did, he publicly thanked Moms Demand Action for their support.”

“I’ve encountered plenty of menacing trolls online, via the Moms Demand Action social media channels, too. Some of these are targeted toward me personally, but most are more generally misogynistic; every day they have posted horrific comments about women and gun violence survivors. In the beginning, I blocked each and every one of them myself. It felt futile, though. One day, I’d had enough and was lying on the floor of my closet, crying. At that moment, I got a phone call from a woman who lived nearby in Indianapolis. She could see on the Moms Demand Action Facebook page how much hate was coming our way. She said, “I’m disabled. I’m home all day. Let me block these people for you.”

She performed that role for years, and I am eternally grateful for her faithful efforts to keep our Facebook page a safe space and build a team of people to help in that effort (in a perfect example of how no one has to take on everything herself). I love her for reaching out in that moment of need.”

“Others have been able to turn their would-be bullies into supporters or at least neutralize them with charm.

A perfect example of this happened at a January 2016 meeting of the then-new Northern Kentucky Moms Demand Action local group. Because this was a new group, the organizers wanted to meet in a safe and inviting space to attract as many people as possible, so they chose the public library in Covington, Kentucky (just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati),

As soon as the leaders pulled into the parking lot, though, they sensed trouble. Michele Mueller, who at that time was the head of the Ohio chapter and who was there that night to help get the new group off the ground, saw a pickup truck in the parking lot with a sticker that read, “If you say guns kill people one more time, I will shoot you, and you will coincidentally die.”

“I thought, ‘Uh-oh,’ Michele recalls.

Sure enough, as soon as they walked in, they saw ten to twelve men, many carrying guns, standing at the main desk, looking for our meeting. The library couldn’t do anything about it, nor could the police, thanks to a 2013 Kentucky law that allowed open carry in any city-owned property. What these men were doing was perfectly legal.

And while they might have thought they could prevent the Moms Demand Action meeting from happening, they soon found out how wrong they were. Our volunteer leaders took a private moment to talk about whether they should hold the meeting or not. “We said to each other, ‘The people of northern Kentucky have been waiting for a new group to start,” Michele remembers.

“So we set up our table, put out our buttons, stickers, and sign-in sheets, and opened the door.” The gun extremists tried to walk right past the table, but the meeting leaders insisted — nicely — that they sign in and take a sticker. When everyone was seated, the volunteers explained that they’d give a presentation and then there’d be time for questions.

Everyone sat respectfully through the meeting except for one mother and a grandmother who came into the room with young children, saw the guns tucked in waistbands and strapped to legs, and left.

When the presentation portion was over, several of the gun supporters came right up to the volunteer leaders and began accusing them of telling lies and asking them why Moms Demand Action thought they didn’t have a right to carry guns. Michele recalls: “The gentleman who came up to me said, ‘Everything you just put up on that screen are lies.’ I told him, ‘No sir, that was all truth. Everything we do is data driven, that’s how we determine strategy.’ One of the men was so angry he was visibly shaking, so Michele and the Kentucky leaders pivoted. “We take photos at every meeting, so I told the man I was talking to, You hold this end of our sign and I’ll hold the other side.’ He tried to give the sign back to me, but I said, ‘Hold still, it will be over in a minute.”

Another Moms Demand Action volunteer snapped a photo. Then Michele and the Kentucky leaders thanked everyone for coming and they all cleared out of the room.

Showing that kind of unflappable hospitality is such a mom thing to do. While it’s nice to be friendly, it’s also — you guessed it — badass to not only be cool in the face of extremism, but to figuratively disarm your opponents by being nice.

“No matter the intimidation or attempts to ridicule us and tromp our message, we stayed focused on our goal for that day — to initiate a brand-new group of Moms Demand Action volunteers willing to raise their voices — and it brought us through,” Michele says. “They felt the power of their guns, but we felt the power of our sisterhood (and our placards).”

“We have a 90% track record of killing bad NRA-supported bills every single year — bills that would allow guns in elementary schools or on college campuses, would legalize permitless carry, or would make ‘stand your ground’ a valid legal defense. Before Moms Demand Action came along, no one was providing any opposition to these bills; now we do that.”

“If you think there’s no chance in hell you can win something, you might be tempted to not even try. After all, why pick a fight when you’re pretty sure you’re going to get beat up? But the biggest loss is not trying at all, because it prevents you from picking up crucial gains along the way that help create momentum — whether that’s new members, more visibility, an opening to change a conversation, or a social media moment that puts you on the map. Sometimes the biggest successes come not from outright triumph, but from refusing to go down quietly.”

“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.”

“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, lowa, 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.”

“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.”

“In 2015 executive vice president of the NRA Wayne LaPierre took home $5.1 million; I took home $0. Whose motivations do you trust?

From the very beginning, I vowed not to take any compensation for my work with Moms Demand Action. That’s because I want to do this work as an advocate who is driven by passion and commitment, not money — and because I want our volunteers to know that I am just another member of their army, even if I often serve as the tip of the spear. Of course, I’m lucky and privileged that my husband is able to support our family without my needing to earn an income, and I’m honored to be able to put that good fortune to use doing such important work. This makes it incredibly ironic when the NRA accuses Moms Demand Action volunteers of being paid to show up and protest. But really, we shouldn’t be surprised — it’s a classic hallmark of manipulation and narcissism to accuse your opponent of doing the exact thing that you yourself are doing.”

“Before our volunteer army existed, entirely too many bad gun bills moved through statehouses like hot knives through butter. Now Moms Demand Action volunteers regularly outnumber gun-rights advocates by an order of magnitude, and our presence plays a huge role in 90 percent of bad gun bills being defeated in statehouses across the country each year.”

“I think of dealing with the ego as being similar to the way you deal with that well-meaning relative who always makes subtle (or not so subtle) judgey comments at the Thanksgiving table: you view the comment in your mind as a cloud and watch it float away.”

“Moms Demand Action bases its policy platform on data-driven research that focuses on one specific outcome: what will save the most lives. On the basis of the available evidence, we know three policies that have proved to be extremely effective at reducing gun deaths: closing loopholes in the background check system, keeping guns out of the hands of known domestic abusers, and passing red flag laws (which allow for the temporary removal of guns from individuals who have shown patterns of violence). These policies are effective, and they enjoy bipartisan support, which is why we’ve made them our top policy priorities.

Certainly, other policies are important to our volunteers, including restrictions on assault weapons. Moms Demand Action supports limitations on assault weapons to restrict access to firearms like the ones used in the Parkland, Las Vegas, and Pulse shootings, as well as most of the deadliest mass shootings in recent history. We’ve been proud to stand alongside local gun safety advocates who’ve helped pass commonsense restrictions on assault weapons in places like Boulder, Colorado, after the Parkland shooting and Washington State in the 2018 midterms. But while assault-style weapons certainly put the “mass” in mass shooting, the data show that rifles are responsible for only about 3 percent of gun-related homicides; most firearms deaths and injuries are caused by handguns. That’s why we keep our focus on our top priorities.”

“Most people don’t realize that it takes a ton of training and experience to be able to use a weapon with any accuracy in a stressful situation. The military requires extensive training before a soldier can carry any new weapon and requires yearly requalification on that weapon for the soldier to continue using it, since knowing how to shoot a gun and shooting it accurately are skills that can wane over time. Yet every single year the NRA is trying to strip from state laws mandatory training around gun ownership.”

“The whole world struggles with mental healch issues, According to the World Health Organization, the Americas have only 21 percent of worldwide cases of anxiety and 15 percent of incidences of depression, but the United States alone has a gun murder rate that is twenty times higher than that in other developed countries, Blaming mental illness for gun violence is the same as blaming movies, video games, or the culture at large — it’s a tactic meant solely to distract from the real issue, which is easy access to guns, even for people with a history of criminal activity, and weak gun laws. In fact, people with mental illnesses are much more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators.

However, many mass shooters have a history of mental illness in fact, 42 percent of mass shooters “exhibited warning signs before the shooting indicating that they posed a danger to themselves or others.” This makes it all the more important that we pass red flag laws. Some of these laws, such as the one passed in Delaware in 2018, also allow mental health professionals to report people who are exhibiting dangerous behavior and procure a court order to have their guns removed temporarily.”

“MYTH: Guns Make Women Safer

Fact: Women in the United States — which has more guns than the next twenty-five countries combined — are eleven times more likely to be killed by a gun than women in other high-income countries. This is in large part because of the fact that if a gun is readily available during a domestic violence situation, a woman is five times more likely to be killed. In an average month, fifty American women are shot to death by an intimate partner, and nearly one million American women alive today have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner. If that’s not bad enough, four and a half million American women alive today have been threatened by an intimate partner with a gun.

Here’s what does make women safer: background checks. in fact, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has blocked more than three hundred thousand gun sales to domestic abusers since its inception in 1998, and it continues to save lives every day: one in seven unlawful gun buyers stopped by a federal background check is a domestic abuser. In states that go beyond federal law and require background checks on all handgun sales, the rate of women shot to death by intimate partners is 47 percent lower.

The problem is that there are too many gaps in federal and state gun laws that leave women vulnerable.”

“There are two important categories of domestic abusers that laws typically don’t cover: convicted stalkers and abusive dating partners (known as the “boyfriend loophole”). This is especially alarming considering that more American women are killed by people they are dating than by their spouses.

• Many times, state law doesn’t back up federal law. Without matching provisions in state law, local law enforcement has no way to enforce federal restrictions. Federal law prohibits convicted domestic abusers from possessing a gun, but it doesn’t affirmatively require them to turn in any guns they already own. Neither do the laws in thirty-five states. Thirty-five states!

We still have a long way to go on keeping women safe from guns, particularly in domestic abuse settings, which is why working to get state laws passed that provide clear, enforceable laws that do just that is so important. The good news is that since 2012, twenty-eight states plus the District of Columbia have strengthened their laws to keep guns away from domestic abusers. And we are not letting up anytime soon.

MYTH: Arming Teachers Will Make Kids Safer

Fact: The push to arm teachers isn’t, at its root, about keeping kids safer. It’s about selling more guns. Since Donald Trump was elected president, gun sales have plummeted because there’s no boogeyman in the White House to make people afraid that their guns will be taken away from them. Known as the “Trump Slump,” this downturn in gun sales is hurting gun manufacturers: American Outdoor Brands, the manufacturer of Smith & Wesson guns, announced a 32 percent decline in sales for the third quarter of 2017, and giant gun maker Remington filed bankruptcy in February 2018, saying that it had between $100 million and $500 million in debts.”

“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. 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.

Since 2015, the numbers of hate groups and hate crimes have increased; for example, anti-Muslim hate groups tripled in 2016. 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. 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. 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.”

“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. 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.”

“Maria 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.”

“Family obligations also factor in, which may explain why the average age for a woman to run for office in the United States is about fifty — when her children are likely to be grown or nearly grown.”