On 14 December 2012, the day of the Sandy Hook Elementary Mass Shooting, Shannon Watts was a 41-year-old former communications executive who had put her career on pause to become a full-time stay-at-home mom.
But Sandy Hook changed everything. As her Moms Demand Action bio states:
The day after the Sandy Hook tragedy, Shannon started a Facebook group with the message that all Americans can and should do more to reduce gun violence. The online conversation turned into a grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures that protect people from gun violence. Moms Demand Action has established a chapter in every state of the country and is part of Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country, with over 6 million supporters.
Today, Shannon is not only one of the most prominent voices for gun reform in America, she is also an active board member of Emerge America, one of the nation’s leading organizations for recruiting and training women to run for office.
The tragedy of gun violence is in the news again in recent days, most remarkably in the on-set tragedy that led to actor Alec Baldwin fatally shooting cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.
But that’s not why I reached out to Shannon Watts for this email Q&A. I wanted to ask her about the bigger picture of gun violence and what can be done about it specifically after a recent shooting in Boise that prompted Idaho Governor Brad Little to tweet: “Those injured in today’s unthinkable shooting at the Boise Towne Square Mall are in my prayers. The State of Idaho stands prepared to assist the Boise Police Department as they investigate the shooting,” to which Shannon Watts responded:
As I began to prepare my questions for Shannon, this tweet also drew my attention:
Q&A with Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action:
Everytown for Gun Safety now has six million members, making it bigger than the NRA. How do you think Moms Demand Action, Students Demand Action and Everytown have influenced the debate?
When we started doing this work nearly a decade ago, gun violence was viewed as a third-rail issue in American politics. There was this concern from politicians that they would alienate voters by talking about gun safety measures. But our movement successfully made it a mainstream issue, and proved that the majority of Americans care about it. So state by state, community by community, we organized and grew the largest grassroots gun violence prevention movement in the country — which is now bigger than the NRA. I truly believe the biggest threat to the gun lobby is an army of angry moms, because if we lose our children, we have nothing left to lose.
What has inspired you the most in your nine years of gun violence prevention activism?
Gun violence survivors are the North Star of our movement, and working alongside those who have turned their grief and anger into action has been incredibly inspiring to me. Witnessing the work survivors have done to save the lives of others even after experiencing tragedy themselves motivates me and so many others to keep going.
What are Moms Demand Action’s biggest achievements to date?
We’ve changed the politics on gun safety, won elections across the country up and down the ballot, passed hundreds of good gun safety laws in red, blue and purple states all while stopping the gun lobby’s agenda 90% of the time for each of the last six years. Those are the high visibility wins we're immensely proud of. But I am also proud of the not-so-visible wins: the volunteers who do the heavy lifting of grassroots activism day in and day out, who fight this fight even when it seems no one else is watching. We have chapters in every state and volunteers who give up their nights, weekends and early mornings to help protect your family and mine.
How has the pandemic changed things? Why are parents fighting more over masks than they are over active shooter drills?
Children aren’t traumatized by wearing a mask, but there is plenty of evidence that shows they're traumatized by active shooter drills. In fact, Everytown partnered with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab to study the immediate and long-term impacts of active shooter drills on the health and wellbeing of students, teachers, and parents, and what we found was staggering. Active shooter drills in schools are associated with a 39% increase in depression, a 42% increase in stress and anxiety, and a 23% increase in physiological health problems overall, including in children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Keeping our children safe at school is a core part of our mission, and it starts first and foremost with secure firearm storage so students can’t get their hands on guns to begin with.
What are your key areas of focus right now?
Our focus is always on ending gun violence by advocating for common sense solutions that are proven to save lives and electing gun sense champions who will make that happen. That’s why we’re working at all levels of government to secure funding for community-based violence intervention programs which have been proven to save lives in the communities most impacted by gun violence. We’re incredibly excited to see the Biden-Harris Administration’s Build Back Better plan which was just released include $5 billion for these programs -- a truly historic investment. Additionally, we’re continuing to fight to close loopholes in our gun safety laws that allow people to purchase firearms without a background check, as well as to expand extreme risk protection laws that allow for family and law enforcement to remove guns before someone can cause incredible harm, as well as to disarm domestic abusers. And, with 5.4 million children now living in homes with unsecured firearms, we’re seeing increasing incidents of unintentional shootings by children and gun violence at schools. That’s why our volunteers have been working with school boards across the country to pass secure storage notification ordinances to require children be sent home with materials on how critical it is for firearms to be locked, unloaded, and stored separately from ammo. Thanks to their efforts, more than 1.5 million students around the country are now in schools with these secure gun storage notification policies.
What are the major barriers to future progress and how do you plan to overcome them?
Social change takes time. If you look to past movements from civil rights to women’s suffrage to the LGBTQ movement, it took decades of work by generations of activists to make real, lasting change. I see a similar dynamic in the gun violence prevention movement, and we’re working against the gun lobby that’s become entrenched in our politics and public policy for decades. We’re slowly but surely loosening the gun lobby’s stranglehold and ultimately, we will prevail as we truly are on the right side of history.
What’s at stake in 2022? How big an issue will gun violence prevention be in the midterms?
Gun safety is on the ballot from Congress to state legislatures to city council and school district races, so the stakes are incredibly high. That’s why our grassroots army of more than 6 million volunteers and supporters will be going all out to build on our progress and continue electing gun sense champions at all levels of government. More and more often though, that’s included electing our own volunteers who are taking their next step in advocacy and running for office themselves. To supercharge those efforts, we recently launched a new program, Demand a Seat, to recruit and train our volunteers and survivors of gun violence to run for office or work on campaigns, and the enthusiasm we’ve seen so far is incredibly inspiring. In the first few months, we’ve had over 140 people sign up from 37 states, including moms, dads, students, and more than 60 gun violence survivors. As the saying goes, if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu. Since the beginning of our organization, our volunteers have fought for the people sitting at the table to listen to them. Some wouldn’t, so now our volunteers and gun violence survivors will fight to fill their seats.
How can people get involved? What actions can they take to help?
Get off the sidelines and get involved! Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action have volunteer chapters in every state and all action is good action. Text JOIN to 644-33 to get connected to someone in your community and learn more about how you can get involved in this movement.
Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action, which has established a volunteer chapter in every state of the country and Washington, D.C. and is part of Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country with more than six million supporters and 375,000 donors. She is also the author of the book Fight Like a Mother.
Follow her on Twitter: @shannonrwatts
Unprecedented is an ad-free email newsletter. All content is “unlocked,” so it’s absolutely FREE to read and subscribe. It only requires an email. But if you’d like to support my work with a paid subscription or a one-time contribution, I certainly welcome the support!
Subscribe to Unprecedented
Subscribe to the newsletter and unlock access to member-only content.