These Women Are the NRA's Worst Nightmare
Can Moms Demand Action do to gun extremists what MADD did to drunk drivers?
motherjones.com
A march across the Brooklyn Bridge, June 2014 John Minchillo/AP
KELLY BERNADO WOKE to the headlines after working her late shift as an ER nurse in Seattle, and she cried through the day and into the next, the shooting at her own son's high school a year before haunting her all over again. In Houston the morning after it happened, Kellye Burke was on her way to pick up a Christmas tree, her six-year-old son nestled in his car seat, when she saw the large LED road sign publicizing a gun show and felt the urge to scream. In Brooklyn, Kim Russell felt a surge of adrenaline when she heard the news; after choking back the nausea, she began agonizing about what her first-grader would hear at school. She'd never told her daughter about the time when a robber shot her friend to death and wounded her, then pressed the cold muzzle against her forehead as she begged for her life.
At home in an Indianapolis suburb the morning following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Shannon Watts, a 41-year-old former public relations executive and mother of five, created a Facebook page calling for a march on the nation's capital: "Change will require action by angry Americans outside of Washington, D.C. Join us—we will need strength in numbers against a resourceful, powerful and intransigent gun lobby." The seed for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America—today a national organization backed by nearly 200,000 members and millions of dollars—had been planted. "I started this page because, as a mom, I can no longer sit on the sidelines. I am too sad and too angry," Watts wrote. "Don't let anyone tell you we can't talk about this tragedy now—they said the same after Virginia Tech, Gabby Giffords, and Aurora. The time is now."
Three days later, five women convened in Brooklyn for a Skype call with Watts and formed the group's first chapter. They felt that what happened in Newtown was like another 9/11. None of the women had experience as political activists, but they did remember Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the pioneering grassroots movement of the 1980s that rewrote laws and battled cultural resignation about alcohol-related traffic deaths. They also realized they had an asset that MADD organizers could only have dreamed of: social media. As word of a new effort to confront gun violence sprang up in Facebook feeds, offers flooded in to help launch more chapters, from Virginia and Texas to Kentucky and Colorado.
Kim Russell, Lucia McBath, and Erica Lafferty during the NRA's 2014 annual meeting Everytown for Gun Safety
Today, Moms Demand Action has teams on the ground in all 50 states, elbowing their way into policy hearings and working to motivate "gun sense voters" fed up with the carnage. In less than two years, the organization has compelled more than a half-dozen national restaurant chains, internet companies, and retailers to take a stand against lax gun laws, and has joined forces with one of the nation's most deep-pocketed political operators to hold elected leaders to account. Many groups have taken on the nation's 30,000 annual firearm deaths—and this latest effort bears resemblance to the Million Mom March in the wake of the 1999 Columbine shooting, whose organizers also sought to be "a MADD for guns." But no group has risen so far, so fast, influencing laws, rattling major corporations, and provoking vicious responses from hardcore gun rights activists. With its ambition to turn out a million voters for the November midterms, Moms Demand Action may be emerging as a potent threat to the National Rifle Association's three-decade-long stranglehold on gun politics.
IF STRICTER NATIONAL gun laws seemed imminent in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, just four months later the popular narrative was that any chance for change had been deep-sixed. A majority in the US Senate approved universal background checks for gun buyers, but the bill fell a few votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Once again, the NRA had won.
But Moms Demand Action took the fight to another arena—public opinion, with a special focus on brand-conscious corporate America. After Sandy Hook, Second Amendment activists had stepped up a tradition of openly carrying firearms into Starbucks stores ("open carry" is legal to varying degrees in all but a few states), so in May 2013, Moms launched a campaign urging members to "#SkipStarbucks" on Saturdays and post pictures of themselves having coffee elsewhere. Watts and Kate Beck, a Moms leader in Starbucks' hometown of Seattle, published a scathing op-edon CNN.com calling out the company's inaction and citing an accidental shooting at a Starbucks in Florida and a rally at another in South Dakota that drew 60 armed activists. "As mothers," they said, "we wonder why the company is willing to put children and families in so much danger. Nobody needs to be armed to get a cup of coffee."
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