Shannon Watts has made herself a nightmare for the Rifle Association by uniting 8 million mothers battling to limit the sale of automatic rifles.
Before a million women, there were a million mothers. And it all started with one: Shannon Watts, with five children and an ‘accidental activist’. On December 14, 2012, she was shocked in front of the television to see a young gunman entered the school in Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut, not far from where she was born. “As a mother, it was insufferable to me to learn that twenty children and six educators had been massacred in the sanctity of an elementary school in the United States,” she recalled. “How can we make that happen, right where children should feel safest?”
An entire decade of activism later, the country shook again last month in Uvalde, Texas, with another school massacre of similar characteristics. Sandy Hook has gone down in history as the second worst school massacre in terms of casualty count, after Virginia Tech University, but it was the only one to publicly bring tears to a president, Barack Obama. The victims were 6 and 7 years old. Their small bodies were shattered by the bullets that Adam Lanza unloaded with a semi-automatic Bushmaster XM-15, an assault rifle along the lines of the AR-15 that Salvador Ramos used last month to kill 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde. “Designed to exceed all expectations,” the manufacturer boasts. Indeed. The hole it leaves is so big that funeral homes had to use the best tanopraxia techniques to reconstruct the corpses before showing them to their parents.
That day in 2012, Shannon sat down at her computer and started a Facebook group called “Moms Demands Action.” That spread like wildfire. “I’m not a social media expert, I only had 75 friends on Facebook,” she recalls. “My Twitter account wasn’t even active. But in my heart I knew that millions of mothers felt the same as me: fear, frustration, it was enough.
His message was simple: “We don’t want any more condolences and prayers from our politicians. We want action. We want real changes. We want policies that keep our families safe,” he wrote. Today, his movement has eight million followers, three more than the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), which has become his worst nightmare. “They are bleeding out political power and dollars.” “My favorite story is that last year they tried to file for bankruptcy and didn’t want to. They spent a fortune on lawyers. They are now consumed with internal strife. I would like to see the faces of the politicians who have been given checks when they try to cash them in. Maybe this time we are the ones who should send him our condolences and our prayers,” he smiles.
In fact, now she’s the one Democratic politicians who need votes come to ask for support. “We have made it clear to them that if they defend our safety we will stand behind them, but if they resist we will take their jobs. And this came as a surprise to those who have been voting for gun lobby proposals for decades. When it began, 25% of Congressional Democrats received the NRA’s highest grade, an A. Today, none. However, it is too late, as she herself admits that “the NRA’s agenda has shifted to the far right of the country. Now they don’t even need the NRA anymore. He lives in the far right, which is creating armed militias,” he says with concern. “A survey shows that 22% of Republican lawmakers belong to groups such as the Proud Boys or QAnon. The mix of white supremacy and easy access to weapons is very dangerous.”
If all this has been an earthquake for American politics, then even more so for his personal life. He never imagined that ten years after Sandy Hook, he would still be fighting for gun laws. The horror of that massacre of children opened up an opportunity, with the most conservative Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin, and his Republican friend, Patrick Toomey, leading a two-pronged initiative to ban assault rifles and demand gun licenses, among other things. “I was very naive,” she admits. “I really believed that the way was clear and that in a few weeks or months they would pass the legislation and we would go back to our daily lives. I still remember that day in 2013 when I saw the mood in the Senate Gallery. We lost by six votes. I was shocked, devastated.”
How he picked up the pieces of that shattered illusion and continued the struggle for a decade, achieving significant changes that may be lost in the headlines of so many mass shootings, enough to write an activism handbook and win awards in the process. ‘El Correo’ interviewed her in Austin, Texas, where she explained her experience to a whole generation of organizers who attended the Arena Summit, a group founded after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory that trains young people from across the country to fighting for progressive causes they are passionate about.
The 2013 legislative defeat taught Watts the most important lesson. “We found that our work doesn’t necessarily end in Congress, but rather begins in state parliaments, city councils, and even school boards,” he told them. “If Congress closes the door on us, we’ll have to go in through the window.”
They had been dealing with one of the most powerful lobbies in the country, that of guns. And to change it they would have to compete with their own arsenal, money. They started boycotting Starbucks, which banned access on a scooter but allowed access with an AR-15. “We created the hashtag #SkipStarbucksSaturday and showed them that we would have coffee on Saturdays at home or with their competitors until they banned assault rifles.” Then they went for the hypermarket chain Target. One by one, they changed the culture of the country through their power as consumers. After all, it is the mothers who have the most weight in the shopping cart. Some executives told them straight to the face that they would never change those policies, like those of the Kroger chain, which they put on billboards. It took five years, but after the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, Florida, where Nikolas Cruz killed 17 high school classmates with an AR-15 rifle, Kroger admitted.
Every massacre is a defeat. The 51-year-old mother knows better than anyone the frustration and discouragement that comes with any mass shooting, but she is determined to continue the fight using a method she calls “gradual and tireless,” she told Arena activists. “We show them that mothers have a long memory when the lives of our loved ones are at stake.” And yes, she also wants to throw in the towel when she sees another young man like Robert Crimo murder seven people in the Highland Park (Illinois) July 4th Parade, firing an assault rifle from a rooftop. ‘But what’s the alternative? It took a hundred years of activism for women to have the right to vote. Nearly half a century, until the Most High recognized the right to same-sex marriage. And to the Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, 20 years to lower the federal alcohol limit. Imagine if one of them had given up after ten years! It’s going to take generations to get all the changes we want, but I know we’re firmly rooted in history, and they won’t move us.”
Source: La Verdad
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