COLORADO MOM CHALLENGES NRA ON GUN VIOLENCE
Shannon Watts founded a Facebook group to end gun violence after the Sandy Hook shooting. Moms Demand Action now has almost 6 million supporters.
Shannon Watts was looking for a Facebook group aimed at ending gun violence. She didn’t find one, so she founded Moms Demand Action, which put her in the cross hairs of the NRA.
Shannon Watts folded laundry as news of the horrific Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 20 children and six adults flashed across her television screen in 2012, rattling something inside the mother of five that couldn’t be stifled. That newfound, burning activism would soon position the Colorado woman to identify herself as the National Rifle Association’s worst nightmare.
Watts scoured Facebook after the Sandy Hook shooting, looking to join a group similar to Mothers Against Drunk Driving but with a focus on ending gun violence. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she made her own. The group became Moms Demand Action, now one of the most well-known gun control organizations in the nation with almost 6 million supporters. Watts remains at the helm, pushing through death threats and personal call-outs from the NRA to help pass gun control legislation in statehouses around the country.
“I didn’t know anything about policy or organizing,” Watts said. “I just knew more guns was not the solution. I only had 75 Facebook friends, but it was like lightning in a bottle. People kept finding and joining the group.”
The online conversation evolved into an offline movement.
Now, Watts, who moved to Boulder in 2014, has written her first book called “Fight Like a Mother: How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World.” The activist is traveling around the country promoting it and spreading her message to end gun violence. Protests already have followed her.
Jennifer Hope, a mother of eight who lives on Jefferson County’s Lookout Mountain, found the Facebook group days after the Sandy Hook shooting and messaged Watts asking to get involved.
Hope’s older children attended a Jefferson County high school during the 1999 Columbine shooting. Her kids still wake at night dreaming of the smell of gunfire after witnessing the 2011 shooting of Grace Dougherty by Walsenburg police. A year later, Hope was startled to learn a friend was inside Aurora’s Century 16 movie theater when 12 people were fatally shot and 58 were injured.
“Gun violence just kept hitting me — around me — over and over and over again, and I thought, ‘If I didn’t do something, who would?’ ” Hope said.
Within five minutes of joining the Facebook group, Hope was on the phone with Watts, agreeing to lead a Colorado chapter of Moms Demand Action.
“It took a lot of learning,” Hope said. “Learning how to navigate the statehouse. Learning how to get an appointment with a state legislator. Learning how to interview. How to talk to Cory Gardner’s staff. I had to navigate a whole new world, but it’s really empowering.”
Moms Demand Action — a branch of Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country — zeros in on stopping bills they believe would lead to more gun proliferation such as arming teachers and lobbying for gun control legislation through testimony, phone banks, rallies and community engagement.
Watts describes some of the organization’s biggest victories as helping 20 states pass stronger gun laws in 2018,
“I didn’t know anything about policy or organizing. I just knew more guns was not the solution. I only had 75 Facebook friends, but it was like lightning in a bottle. People kept finding and joining the group.” Shannon Watts, above, founder of Moms Demand Action a political activist group that fights for gun control legislation in all 50 states
with nine signed into law by Republican governors; passing red flag laws like the one in Colorado that temporarily removes firearms from people believed to be at high risk of harming themselves or others; electing dozens of Moms Demand Action volunteers and gun violence survivors to local and federal office; and convincing businesses from Starbucks to Chipotle to Target to ask customers to stop open carrying in stores.
“Gun violence was not a part of the conversation of politics, and now it is front and center,” Hope said. “That’s largely because of Moms Demand Action. The moms have done it. We have brought this into everybody’s living room.”
That notoriety has reshaped the quiet life Watts knew.
Watts now travels using an alias and with security. She and her daughters receive a barrage of physical and sexual threats of violence. The NRA has singled out Watts in social media posts, linking to her accounts and asking its Twitter and Instagram followers to tell her what they think about ammunition bans.
“Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety is just the latest iteration of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s gun control lobby,” read a statement from Jennifer Baker, an NRA spokeswoman. “He has a new brand and frontman, but the agenda is the same: ban guns.”
Lesley Hollywood, founder of local gun rights advocacy group Rally for our Rights, agreed.
Hollywood and about a dozen other Second Amendment advocates gathered outside Denver’s Tattered Cover Bookstore on Wednesday night to protest while Watts talked about her new book
Hollywood, a single mother to three daughters, said she wanted to make sure people knew that Watts doesn’t speak for every mother.
“I am my children’s line of selfdefense,” Hollywood said. “All of us today whether a mom, daughter or concerned citizen see things happening like school shootings, and we worry about the exact same things. My worst fear is that they would be in one of those situations, but what I fear even more than that is that they would be in one of those situations with nobody there to defend them.”
Douglas County families had their fears realized in May when one student was killed and eight others injured in a shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch. Days after the tragedy, the Douglas County Moms Demand Action meeting, which normally has about a dozen attendees, saw about 450 people show up to talk about ending gun violence.
After each new mass shooting, Watts said more concerned citizens turn to the group just as she did when creating it a few years ago — wanting to make a difference but unsure where to start.
Hope noted that there were so many roles volunteers could fill: data that needs entering, phone calls that need to be made, money to be raised, events to be planned. Volunteers don’t have to be women or moms, although Watts said it’s the motherhood aspect she believes is the “secret sauce” for the organization’s success.
If motherhood isn’t used as a tool, Watts said, it will be used as a weapon against women. Watts tries to harness the multi-tasking nature of motherhood along with the role of “default caretakers of the community” to activate moms in the name of gun safety.
“Everybody listens to their mom,” Hope said. “It makes it personal. It’s different to have politicians talk about gun violence than it is to have your family talk to you about it. We talk to our families. We talk to our neighbors. Moms Demand Action has given me a voice I didn’t know how to use before, and now I feel like I can use it, and you can, too.”