Shannon Watts has made herself a nightmare for the Rifle Association by uniting 8 million mothers fighting to restrict the sale of automatic rifles.
Before a million women, there was a million mothers. And it all started with one: Shannon Watts, with five children and “activist by accident.” On December 14, 2012, she was horrified in front of the television when she saw that an armed young man had entered the school in Sandy Hook (Newtown, Connecticut), not far from where she herself was born. “As a mother, it was insufferable for me to learn that twenty children and six educators had been massacred in the sanctity of an elementary school in the United States,” she recalls. “How can we allow that to happen, precisely in the place where children should feel safest?”
A whole decade of activism later, another school massacre with the same characteristics shook the country again last month in Uvalde, Texas. Sandy Hook has gone down in history as the second worst school massacre in terms of number of victims, after Virginia Tech University, but it was the only one that publicly brought tears to a president, Barack Obama. The victims were 6 and 7 years old. Their little bodies were shattered by the bursts of 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 nineteen children and two teachers in Uvalde. “Designed to exceed all expectations,” boasts the manufacturer. Indeed. The hole it leaves is so huge that funeral homes needed 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 no social media expert, I only had 75 friends on Facebook,” she recalls. “My Twitter account wasn’t even active. But I knew in my heart that millions of mothers were feeling the same as me: fear, frustration, fed up.
“We don’t want any more condolences”
His message was simple: “We no longer want condolences and prayers from our politicians. We want action. We want real changes. We want policies that keep our families safe,” she wrote. Today his movement has eight million followers, three more than the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), of which it has become his worst nightmare. “They are hemorrhaging political power and dollars,” she says with satisfaction. “My favorite story is that last year they tried to file for bankruptcy and they wouldn’t let them. They spent a fortune on lawyers. They are now consumed in internecine struggles. I would love to see the faces of the politicians who have been sent checks when they try to cash them. Maybe this time we are the ones who have to send him our condolences and our prayers », she smiles.
In fact, now she is the one that Democratic politicians who need votes come to ask for support. “We have made it clear to them that if they defend our security, we will have their back, but if they oppose, we will take their jobs. And this has come as a surprise to those who have been voting in favor of arms lobby proposals for decades. When it started, 25% of congressional Democrats received the NRA’s highest grade of A. Today, none. It is, however, too late, because she herself recognizes that «the NRA’s agenda has moved to the extreme right of the country. Now they don’t even need the NRA. He lives in the extreme right, which is creating armed militias », she tells with concern. “A study reveals that 22% of Republican legislators belong to groups such as the Proud Boys or QAnon. The mix of white supremacy and easy access to guns is very dangerous.”
If all this has been an earthquake for American politics, even more so for his personal life. He never thought that ten years after Sandy Hook he would still be fighting for gun control laws. The horror of that child massacre opened a window of opportunity, with the most conservative Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, and his Republican friend, Patrick Toomey, leading a bipartisan initiative to ban assault rifles and require gun permits, among others. measures. “I was very naive,” he admits. “I really believed that the way was clear and that in a matter of 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 watched the vote from the Senate gallery. We lost by six votes. I was shocked, devastated.”
ten years of revolution
How he picked up the pieces of that broken illusion and continued the fight for a decade, achieving important changes that may be lost in the headlines of so many mass shootings, enough to write an activism manual and win awards with it. ‘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 created after Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 that trains young people from all over the country to fight for progressive causes that they are passionate about.
The 2013 legislative defeat taught Watts the most important lesson. “We discovered that our work doesn’t necessarily end in Congress, but starts in state parliaments, city councils, and even school boards,” she told them. “If Congress closes the door on us, we have to enter through the window.”
They had faced one of the most powerful lobbies in the country, that of weapons. And to change it they would have to compete with their own arsenal, money. They began by boycotting Starbucks, which prohibited entry on a scooter but allowed entry with an AR-15. “We created the #SkipStarbucksSaturday hashtag and showed them that on Saturdays we would have coffee at home or with their competitors until they banned assault rifles.” Then they went for the Target hypermarket chain. One by one they were changing the culture of the country through their power as consumers. After all, it is the mothers who carry the most weight in the shopping cart. Some executives told them to their faces that they would never change that policy, like those at the Kroger chain, which they put up 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 relented.
Every massacre is a defeat. The 51-year-old mother knows better than anyone the frustration and discouragement that every mass shooting brings, but she is determined to continue the fight with 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 kill seven people in the Highland Park (Illinois) 4th of July parade, shooting from a rooftop with an assault rifle. “But what is the alternative? It took a hundred years of activism for women to gain the right to vote. Almost half a century, until the Supreme recognized the right of homosexual marriages. And to the Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, twenty years to reduce the level of alcohol allowed at the federal level. Imagine if any of them had given up after a decade! It’s going to take generations to get all the changes we want, but I know we have our feet firmly planted in history, and they won’t move us.”
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