Streams of women and men wearing bright red T-shirts trickled into the back room at the Footnotes café attached to Bookmarks in Winston-Salem on Friday afternoon. Each held a hardback titled, Fight Like a Mother: How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World. A few minutes later, the author herself graced the stage.
“The day that the tragedy happened, I was folding laundry,” Shannon
Watts said to the crowd. “I can remember being in my bedroom watching the news
come in… that there was an active shooter in Newton, Conn. And I can remember
thinking…, Please don’t let this be as bad as it seems… and even now,
six and a half years later, it is hard for me to fathom that 20 first graders
and six educators were gunned down inside an American elementary school.”
“The day that the tragedy happened, I was folding laundry.”
Watts founded Moms Demand Action — a grassroots movement
made up mostly of mothers who stand against gun violence. She spoke with Liz
Noland, the co-lead of the local Moms Demand Action chapter, during the event. A
crowd of close to 100 people gathered to hear the author and activist speak,
many of whom were wearing the movement’s signature red shirts.
A mother of five from Zionsville, Ind., Watts explained that
she began Moms Demand Action after grieving for the children killed at Sandy
Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.
“I started getting really angry,” Watts said. “A, that this
had happened, but B, that I was seeing pundits and politicians on television
telling me that the solution was more guns.”
A little more than six years later and the movement that
Watts started through a Facebook group has grown to more than 6 million
supporters and a chapter in every state in the country. Fight Like a Mother, Watts’ recent book, covers the founder’s
journey from the beginning of the movement and what she hopes the future looks
like.
Watts mentioned the many victories, including legislation
that supports background checks and red flag laws in dozens of states, fighting
thousands of bills backed by the NRA and helping get what Watts calls “gun
sense” politicians into office.
During the Q&A, Watts encouraged attendees to get
involved by talking to school board members and looking up politicians’ gun
stances online while Noland spoke about the efficacy of canvassing door to
door.
Malishai Woodbury, the chair of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth
County School Board, attended the event and said that she hopes that the new
partnership with the sheriff’s department to have at least two school resource
officers in each high school with more than 1,000 students will help keep
schools safer.
“I’m taking the recommendation on the lead law enforcement
agency to secure our children,” said Woodbury. “The sheriff has been very
intentional about proposing to us that the SROs will look different than in the
past. That this person will be very proactive about building relationships
authentically with our students and helping them to make better decisions.”
Woodbury also brought up a point made by Watts that active-shooter
drills in schools do more harm than good. Watts noted that according to data, the
drills can cause anxiety and depression in children and often don’t help in
situations of actual violence.
Woodbury said that she’s interested in learning more about
the issue and that she would be open to bringing a motion to the school board
to change the current active-shooter drill procedures.
“I wouldn’t want to put [students] in any phycological harm
because of the need to see how to act in a bad situation,” she said.
After the event, mothers and volunteers with Moms Demand
Action lagged behind to recap the event. Laurie Valentine, a mother of two
rising seventh-grade twin daughters said she was inspired to attend the event to
learn more about how to become a stronger proponent for gun safety.
“I’m very concerned about gun violence in our country,”
Valentine said. “This is an epidemic and it just seems like we are at an
impasse.”
While she considers herself an introvert, Valentine said she
would try to email legislators and cavass through texting for the upcoming
elections.
“It seems like when we talk about gun control, it equals in many minds gun confiscation and the conversation shuts down,” Valentine said. “There’s a lot built upon that fear in our society about taking guns away. We have a problem in this country that no other country comes even close to and so are there things that we can do like background checks or talking about how we keep guns safe, magazine capacities that make it harder for somebody to mow down 20 first graders?… What I hear sometimes is, ‘Well the bad guys are still gonna get guns.’ Well does that mean we can’t even try? I mean we have more regulations for our cars or for our allergy medicine than we do for guns and it’s just out of control.”
“We have a problem in this country that no other country comes even close to.”
In the wake of mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, and as
the school year gets started this week, Watts urged attendees to be patient and
to keep working for gun safety.
“This is like any social movement,” she said. “It takes time. It’s hard work. It takes grassroots effort on the ground that eventually points the president and the Congress in the right direction… and if it [doesn’t], that momentum isn’t gonna dissipate and there will be hell to pay in the 2020 elections.”
For more info about Shannon Watts and Moms Demand Action visit the website here.
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Second amendment… Try reading it. Love, mom
One of Bloomberg’s key propaganda machines has again whipped democrats, weak minded Republicans and victims into uncontrolled hysteria. As usual, all these demonstrators have been hoodwinked by Bloomberg’s rhetoric and haven’t read his 2018 data. It reveals gun homicides declined seven percent, firearm injuries declined 10 percent, fatal child shootings (under 18) declined 12 percent and unintentional shootings plummeted 21 percent. Generally, since 1991, the murder rate has fallen by 45 percent and the overall violent crime rate has fallen by 48 percent.
Inexplicably, Bloomberg wants the nation to believe the nation is in crisis, suffering an epidemic. Folks, there is no crisis. Generally, shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the ’90s. During that time, citizens were buying a record number of firearms. In 2018, more than 26 million firearms were purchased, a number exceeded only by 27.5 million in 2016 when purchasers were mortified that Hillary might be elected.
Further, regarding many new laws, the Supreme Court isn’t about to jeopardize its own reputation by reducing the ability of private citizens to defend themselves. It’s especially important because currently, half the nation’s murders occur in only 63 counties while the other half are spread across the other 3,081 counties. Said another way, 15 percent had one murder and 54 percent of the nation’s counties had no murders at all.
Besides, they’re sick of our paralyzed congress creating ambiguous laws that ultimately land in the Supreme Court. They know it’s easy to blame the tools used for murder and to write acts that impede acquisition by peaceable, lawful citizens. They know it’s far more difficult to focus on the more complex reality of why incomprehensible murderers do what they do. If something is to be done, perhaps it should be focused on the mental defectives, criminals, terrorists and illegal aliens.
Looks um… Very diverse, seems as that’s part of the issue here in America.