Shannon Watts: Mobilizing Moms to Demand Action

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0:48I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Now, if you ever want to start a social movement to make things change, this is the episode for you because we have the remarkable Shannon Watts. Shannon started this group called Moms Demand Action. And if there's a group of people that you should not get in the way of, it is moms. Shannon started a Facebook group after the Sandy Hook tragedy. She called for responsible gun control. And this grew into this national organization and has nearly 10 million supporters today. Moms Demand Action has achieved significant legislative success.

1:39It has truly, truly challenged the NRA's political clout. She's a member of Emerge America, a writer and author of Fight Like a Mother. I would pronounce it Fight Like a Mother. How grassroots movement took on the gun lobby and why women will change the world. I highly recommend this book. So with no further ado, here is Shannon Watt. And she's going to tell you how to make things happen.

2:15I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, and we are in the business of making people remarkable. And helping me today is the remarkable Shannon Watts, and I'll let her introduce herself. Thank you. I'm Shannon Watts. I'm the founder emerita of Moms Demand Action, which is now the largest gun violence prevention organization in the nation. And I'm also an organizer and an author and have been doing this work now for over a decade. Thank you very much for that intro. I mean, this is a weird general question that has no real concrete answer, but I just have to ask you, do you sometimes wonder, Shannon, whether as a society, we have learned anything at all in the last 20 years?

2:59I don't think I could be an activist and feel that way. I think hope is, as activists have said in the past, hope is a discipline. And if you aren't hopeful and you aren't joyful in your activism, you will get burned out. And I've seen that happen over and over again. The other thing that I would say is if you expect to win overnight, then sure, you would feel like nothing had happened. But that is another part of activism, which is it is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes decades, if not centuries, to get to where you need to be. That doesn't excuse you from having to do the work, right? You still have to do your piece of it.

3:41But when you can look at it as a long-term project that you are a part of, then you can get out of the weeds and you can see how much progress has been made. You think about movements in the past like civil rights or suffrage or even Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And if those activists had given up after a month or a year, we wouldn't have the society that we have today. So I really do try to look at it like we are making incremental change that leads to revolution. Let's just go back a bit in history. And if you could just briefly summarize the genesis of Moms Demand Action. I had taken about a five-year break from my corporate career.

4:24I had gotten remarried. I was blending a family of five children. And I thought, I'm just going to take a beat. I'll go back to work. I was in corporate communications. And I was getting ready to do that. I had prepared my resume. I was getting ready to go back into the workforce. worse. And one day while all my kids were at school, at the time they ranged in age from elementary school to high school, I was doing laundry, right? That's like a full-time job when you're a mom of five. And so I poured all the laundry out on my bed and I had turned the TV on in the background. And suddenly I saw this chyron of breaking news.

4:59This was December of 2012 that there was a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. I'd never heard of Newtown, Connecticut. I couldn't believe there was a school shooting. I'm sure like so many other women that day, so many other mothers in particular, I stopped what I was doing and for the next many, many hours I was just riveted to the television and devastated. I was in tears over this footage of families in the parking lot waiting to hear if their children or family members had been slaughtered by what appeared to be a very young man with an assault rifle. And I just was inconsolable. This was right before the holidays.

5:43So cold. I just was so devastated. I went to bed. And when I woke up, that devastation had crystallized into abject rage. I was so angry I could not contain myself the next day I can still summon the feeling and So I thought okay. I have to do something I know how to create a Facebook page in 2012 Facebook was a very big deal for women my age to communicate And so I just started a new page. I didn't have a focus group in my Indiana kitchen So I called it one million moms for gun control not realizing that one million moms was like this anti-gay group and that gun control was a phrase that was verboten inside the beltway.

6:25But I sent out this clarion call to other mothers and said, it's time that we stand up and organize against the gun lobby. And that was the beginning of Moms Demand Action. Just like that. Just like that. And you have created an organization that It has about 10 million members. You must be just a fountain of wisdom about how to create an activist organization. So give us some lessons about what you learned back then that other people listening to this can apply when they want to be an activist. I want to be clear that when I started Moms Demand Action, I knew little to nothing about organizing, about the political process, about gun violence even.

7:03I was an absolute novice, and I was told that every turn I wasn't the right person to lead this organization. It already existed. I couldn't do it. It would never work. It needed to be a lobbyist or a lawyer. It needed to be a survivor of gun violence. And I'm not saying none of those things held water. I'm just saying that I trusted my gut. And my gut told me that the best way to take on the most powerful, wealthy, dangerous, special interest that ever has existed was an army of angry mothers. That is what my intuition told me. and one of the most important lessons I would say is that we built the plane as we flew it we did not wait until we crossed every t and dotted every i I would still be learning about all those things organizing gun violence the political system if I had waited we just jumped in and we saw an opening to put pressure on the country and that was a really important lesson I think a lot of people have good ideas and they just wait too long and the moment passes them by And see, the other lesson I learned is that we're all leaders.

8:06I'm not a unicorn. I wasn't born with some amazing talent to do this. I just was an outraged citizen in a democracy. And we all hold that potential to make a difference and to create change, even if it isn't a national organization. It might be in your neighborhood or your community, maybe your state. but that's the beauty of living in a democracy as alice walker says activism is the rent i pay to live on the planet and so we all should be thinking about what is the rent we're paying and the last thing i would say is that politics is cyclical and if you don't have hope if you believe that things are screwed up and that's the way they're always going to be and there's no chance of changing for the better then i think in a lot of ways you're complicit in the system that we have.

8:54It's just morally unacceptable to sit on the sidelines. And in fact, I would go a step further and say there's a moral imperative to run for office, particularly for women. I think that's another important lesson. When you give women the skills to shape policy, they intuitively want to start making it. They want a seat at the table. Women only hold about 25 % of the 500 ,000 elected positions in this country. And as the saying goes, when you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu. And women in America right now are on the menu. Wow. That's a hell of an eloquent statement. My goodness.

9:33No wonder 10 million women follow you. Oh my God. Let me ask you a kind of a gut level question. So obviously gun violence has not exactly stopped. And what's your visceral reaction when you hear politicians say, well, I'm sending my thoughts and prayers? How do you even cope with somebody saying that? As my children say, that is so cringe at this point to even think that that is an acceptable thing to say after a shooting tragedy. And we really have gone out of our way in the last decade to point fingers at people who have been elected to shape policy in this country, who have the power to stop these deaths, relying on thoughts and prayers.

10:16We aren't electing you for your thoughts or your prayers. We are electing you to make policy. And if you are too cowardly to do that, then you shouldn't have that job. But the reality is they're only cowardly often when it comes to gun violence. I think Ted Cruz is such an interesting example of this because he, after every mass shooting tragedy says, oh, we can't talk about this. We can never change this. laws won't impact this and yet after over a dozen people were killed in a hot air balloon accident in Texas what was the very first thing Ted Cruz did he passed safety legislation to regulate hot air balloons throughout the entire country he knows laws work he didn't just rely on thoughts and prayers when it came to the safety of hot air balloons he acted and we know that the reason that America is so unique, we have a 25 times higher gun homicide rate than any pure nation, is because we also have something no pure nation has, a gun lobby.

11:16A gun lobby that is using its wealth and its political power to shape who is elected in this country. And that is on us on voters. I understand we don't lead single issue lives. But when you go to the polls, if you aren't voting on gun violence prevention as an issue? What does it matter if our economy is great, or if we have access to health care, or if we aren't paying capital gains tax, if our children are being slaughtered inside their schools? What does any of that matter? And so that is the goal of Moms Demand Action is to make sure people are thinking about this issue with that lens. There is a certain almost unbelievable irony about Ted Cruz legislating safety for hot air balloons.

12:06Yeah, you cannot make that shit up. It's hypocrisy. So in a perfect world, what does quote unquote good gun safety look like? Are you saying people shouldn't be able to hunt or there should be no guns at all? or what's good, what's a win for you? I think moderation is the key to a lot of what ails us in this country. I was raised by a gun-owning father. Both of my grandfathers who fought in World War II were hunters and gun owners. This is not about taking away anyone's rights. This is about regulating the rights that we have and all rights should be regulated, are regulated. There's no reason for everyday civilians to have unfettered access to arsenals and ammunition, no questions asked.

13:00About 90 % of Americans agree with that, right? We all can agree, and Republicans and Democrats do, on several gun safety measures that would save lives. First of all, background checks on every gun sale. Right now, federal law does not require states to perform background checks on guns sold by unlicensed sellers at gun shows or garage sales, people who are just selling them who aren't dealers. Millions of guns are sold that way. If you're a domestic abuser, how are you going to buy a gun? Are you going to go through the background check you know you're going to fail? Are you going to go to a gun show and get a gun from someone you know doesn't have to perform a background check?

13:39It's intuitive and obvious, but this is a huge loophole in our laws. The other policy that almost all Americans agree on is keeping guns away from domestic abusers. Domestic abusers shouldn't have guns in this country, and yet the Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case. Thankfully, they made a decision in the right way, but there's going to be more complaints, and we're going to keep pressuring the boundaries of whether domestic abusers should have guns. So we've gone state by state and passed those laws. Most Americans agree that there should be something called the red flag law, which means if you are a danger to yourself or someone else, you should not have access to guns until law enforcement and a judge can decide whether you should have access to those guns.

14:20Those laws are incredibly effective, but only about 20 states have them now. Not everyone agrees, but something like 70 % of Americans agree that civilians shouldn't have unfettered access to weapons of war, right? A semi-automatic rifle. If we look at a lot of the shootings in this country, the mass shooting tragedies with major casualties, it's because the gunman had an AR-15. And that is the weapon of choice among white supremacists and mass shooters. It's incredibly dangerous. It is immoral. And yet we have lawmakers who are doing the gun lobby's work and trying to make sure that we all have access to them.

14:58Would you say that at this point that these gun lobbies and the NRA, what is the arc of their power? Is it peaked? Is it still going up? Is it going down? Where are we right now? When I started Moms Demand Action, our theory of change was we will shine a light on the NRA, the National Rifle Association. And sunlight is the best disinfectant. People will see how corrupt they are. People will see that they are in no ways moderate, that in fact they've become an extremist organization. People will see that they're not spending donors' dollars wisely. And they will move away and we will win. They did move away.

15:44The NRA had to declare bankruptcy. Wayne LaPierre has resigned. They are in a world of hemorrhaging political power and dollars, right? The NRA was not even invited to the table to discuss recent federal legislation on guns. What we did not account for in 2012 was that all of these other gun groups that were even more extreme than the NRA, that were to the right of the NRA would pop up at a federal level. And then in fact, guns would become an organizing principle for the right wing. Guns are a way to get young white men in the door to give dollars and to volunteer. And then they use those new volunteers and excite them around a whole host of issues that have nothing to do with guns, right?

16:33Right. And who could have predicted that? But now that is another when you talk about the stranglehold that the gun industry has on our political system and you have to undo it finger by finger. That is a finger that it'll be interesting to see what happens next. And maybe when we break the MAGA fever, we will break the gun extremism fever. And pray tell, what happens if we don't break that fever? What happens if Trump gets elected? What happens if the Republicans control Congress? They already control the Supreme Court. Then what? I think you can see exactly what's going to happen in states like Tennessee.

17:13Tennessee has a Republican supermajority made up of gun extremists, meaning these lawmakers, almost all men, many of them, most of them white men, who have bought the whole gun lobby rhetoric hook, line and sinker. They actually believe, you know, it's not like they're just doing this now because it's a political prop. They have bought into this idea that guns have more value than their constituents. And so when there was a shooting at Covenant School in Nashville last year, there were Congress members and state lawmakers who wouldn't even talk to the survivor families. They had no interest in showing compassion or concern.

17:52And when women from both parties, Republicans and Democrats alike, rose up, mothers who were terrified, not just by what had happened, but by also their lawmakers inaction in the face of this tragedy. What did that Republican supermajority do? They dragged women physically out of the galleries in the statehouse for having signs or wearing shirts that protested gun violence. This is how authoritarians behave. This is the decay of a democracy, right? That's what all the signs coming out of Tennessee are. We have a choice in this country. That's the way we're going or we're going to go back toward what Kamala Harris and Tim Balls are working on, which is both of them in their own right have passed gun safety legislation and want common sense laws in place.

18:42But to your question, if that doesn't happen, if we continue to move right, Tennessee is a harbinger of what is to come.

18:57All right, so let's back off from the worst case, but tell us the steps that seem doable and practical to get to this point of gun safety or gun control. First is finding a piece of the work that you're passionate about and doing it. What I have seen through Moms Demand Action, we're not just moms, we're not just women, we're all caring Americans, we even have Students Demand Action now. But what I have seen is that when there's this trifecta, when women figure out what their abilities are, and they also start to unearth their values, and then their burning desires, those three things, their abilities, their values, their burning desires.

19:40they come alive. I think that's why activism is so joyful and so hopeful because you are using the things, the skills, the passions that are important to you to help other people, right? That's the secret sauce of life. That's why we're here. That's the point of earth school. And when you get involved, you realize, oh, there's so many different ways. Maybe I want to work on this legislatively. Maybe I want to work on it electorally. Maybe I want to work on it culturally. It isn't like you just become an activist and you're showing up at protests and marches. That isn't activism. Maybe you are in charge of data management entry.

20:21Maybe you're meeting with lawmakers or maybe you're tabling at farmers markets. I don't know what is important to you, but it is important to figure that out. And when it comes to gun safety, we're working on this at all levels of government, everything from school boards and city councils to state houses to Congress, changing the way people see secure storage, making sure that people vote on this issue, making sure that we pass or stop laws depending on whether they would save lives. It's really a huge scale of what you can get involved in, but it's important to first take that step and get off the sidelines.

21:00Can you tell us some power tips for influencing and persuading people who, at least at the start, are just diametrically opposed to what you want to accomplish? To take the worst case, if you had to meet with Ted Cruz, what would you do? I think it's really important to delineate extremists from average Americans who have questions or concerns or want to debate. What I have realized in the last 12 years is that there is a very vocal minority, and you will not change their hearts and minds. Absolutely. It is not worth our time. Given that 90 % of Americans support gun safety, why try to change the hearts and minds of this very small minority who are extremists?

21:47I think I would have to put Ted Cruz in that bucket at this point. However, there are people like my dad. My dad is very conservative, Catholic, who voted for Donald Trump. I know in the first election, I'm not sure about the second because I don't want to ask him. And I don't know how he's going to vote in this next election because I don't want to know that either. But when I first started Moms Demand Action, he reached out to me and he thought that I was doing something that was unconstitutional. He thought that that I was doing something radical. and it just took a lot of conversations over that first year.

22:21The way my dad eventually got to wrapping his arms around supporting gun safety was to decide that he thought it was part of a pro-life platform. We disagree on abortion rights but he now says if I support if I don't support abortion then I can't support unfettered access to guns. That's his thought process but we got there because I shared data and anecdotes and stories. And eventually my dad started showing up at Moms Demand Action events wearing our shirt. And that is, I think, the importance of discussion with people who probably agree with you on some things, but not on others. And that's democracy.

23:02And I don't know if I'm incorrectly assuming this, but why do you not feel that you should convince your dad not to vote for Trump. I mean, you're an activist, right? Yeah. And I have laid out my case. Maybe my dad is an extremist when it comes to that. I've had to have my own reckoning with whether my dad has some misogyny in him. I have certainly tried, but I worry that if I know how he voted in the last election or will vote, that I would have a difficulty continuing those conversations with him. I want to continue the conversations, but I also, I'm not sure I'm ready to have the proof that those conversations are fruitless.

23:46Fair enough. Fair enough. Do you, generally speaking, as a political force, do you believe that moms have now arrived as a force? Oh, absolutely. It did take a while. In the early days, even Democrats did not want their pictures taken with Moms Demand Action volunteers. They wanted nothing to do with our red shirts. And the more power we gained, the more we started to organize state by state, the more they were thrilled to have these volunteers in red shirts show up to support them. In 2012, when I started Moms Demand Action, about a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an A rating from the NRA.

24:24A quarter of all Democrats. Today, not one does. And in fact, they're very proud of their F rating. And the way that seismic shift occurred, and that is unheard of in politics, is because they saw they had this army that would support them. And they'd never had that before. They'd only heard from extremists who supported gun manufacturers. Suddenly, they had these moms who actually lived in their districts saying, if you do the right thing, I'll have your back. And if you do the wrong thing, I will have your job. And that was a pretty easy choice for them to make. And so now, you know, Moms Demand Action volunteers are everywhere and lawmakers, at least Democrats, are happy to see them.

25:04But the way we win on this issue is for Republicans and Democrats alike to see Moms Demand Action as a force for good. Do you have a Moms Demand Action grading system a la the NRAs? Yes, it's not a grading system, so to speak. It's more of a word of honor. So it's called GunSenseVoter. You can go to GunSenseVoter.com. I'm sorry,.org. And you will see where your candidates are in your area. And that means if they have filled out a form and the way they filled out the form made them a GunSense candidate, they will be there. If they didn't, they won't. And it's funny because we've even seen Republicans want to have this stamp of approval for Moms Demand Action.

25:45This has become a very important way to delineate between those people who are extremists and those people who are open. And they compete for it in the primary and then in the general election. So it's not necessarily a grading system. It's more of an award, but it's really important filter for voters to know where their candidates stand going into an election. But as you mentioned, they fill out the form. Why don't you just go? If I went there right now and looked up Ted Cruz, there wouldn't be an entry, right? Why don't you just give them an F? We don't have a grading system necessarily because that gives too much room for gray.

26:20And what we really want is to stay in the black and white. If you don't fill out the form and return it, if you don't fill it out the right way, you don't get it at all. And I would hate to give someone a C who is maybe good on one thing and bad on another. This has worked out really well. I think the NRA has even seen the error of their ways. They no longer grade candidates because an A rating from the NRA has become a scarlet letter, if you will. And so they actually took all of their grades down because they didn't want us to use them against them. So Gun Sense Voter has become a really solid way of deciding who has Gun Sense and who doesn't.

26:56Great. Okay. Do you have tips for women about how to become even more audacious? I do. I really think women, especially middle-aged women, underestimate how much power they have and how much wisdom they have. The average age for a woman to run for office is 47 and usually after they've been asked at least seven times Men don't have that same Gating factor often. They think about this as a career on top of the career. They already have They don't see it interrupting their ability to raise a family and so I would love to see women exercise those leadership muscles earlier, but also to understand that they all have that within them.

27:41Again, this idea of what are your abilities? What are your values? And then what are your burning desires? And how do you keep that at the forefront of your life throughout your entire life? We all deserve to leave a legacy. And again, that doesn't mean that you start a company or a huge organization. It just means you lived your life in a way that was authentic and true to you and that you felt alive. And I think men are taught to follow their desires and women are taught to fulfill their obligations. And that is something that if we can start to shift that narrative in women's lives, so much would change, not just in America, but in the world.