It’s About Time! Shannon Watts Tells It Like It Was And Is.
Well it’s about time. The Indiana housewife who
revolutionized how America talks and thinks about guns has finally sat down and
explained how she did what she did after hearing about the tragedy at Sandy
Hook. I’m of course referring to Shannon
Watts, whose accounting of her journey from her kitchen to Mike Bloomberg’s office and back to her kitchen, with many
stops in between, will shortly be published by Harper Collins and I hope will
force Shannon to get back on her horse and do the requisite book tour.
The book is entitled, Fight Like A Mother, and the sub-title, which I really like, is How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun
Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World. The good news about this book is
that while most folks write memoirs to sum up what they have done with their
lives, Shannon is just getting ready to star in Act 2. Her first act, of
course, was when she transformed a little Facebook group that she pulled
together after Sandy into the first, truly grass-roots challenge to the NRA. And if anything, referring to her
as the ‘NRA‘s worst nightmare’ is
something of an understatement in this regard.
I have been involved in the gun business in one way or
another for over fifty years, actually for more than sixty years because my
first connection was as a consumer when I bought a Smith & Wesson K-38 at a
tag sale in Florida when I was twelve years old. Okay, okay, I know it was a
straw sale. But in 1956 there weren’t any straw sales because there were hardly
any laws covering gun ownership at all.
When the feds got into gun regulation big-time, first
in 1968 and again in 1994, the impetus for regulating the gun industry came not
from the bottom but from the top. GCA68 was initially a response to the
assassination of JFK in 1963; it was
passed following the shootings of RFK
and MLK in 1968. The gun law passed by
the Clinton Administration in 1993 were also first introduced in 1991, although
the idea behind the bill had been floating around since both Reagan and Jim
Brady survived an assassination attempt in 1981.
Not only did the 1968 and the 1993 laws pass muster
without any great degree of grass-roots support, but in the aftermath of the
2000 election, when Al Gore couldn’t hold his home state because of pro-gun
messaging from the other side, it became axiomatic in Democratic Party circles that the
gun issue was best left alone.
I am a Life Benefactor Endowment member of the NRA and I never thought that the
organization’s alleged power and strength was such a big deal. Why not? Because
I never met a single person who ever told me they would vote for the candidate
supported by America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ who didn’t own a gun.
And since a majority of Americana don’t own guns, how come everyone has always
been afraid of the big, bad NRA?
I’ll tell you why.
Because until Shannon went out there and began putting together a plan,
the grass-roots movement to stop the madness known as gun violence didn’t
exist. It was one thing to do what our friend
Donna Dees Thomases did in 2000, namely, to fill the National Mall with nearly
one million people for a demonstration
against gun violence. It’s another thing to organize and sustain a national
movement which puts out a coherent and continuous message every single day.
Last month I attended a meeting of the Massachusetts chapter
of MOMs. Several hundred people filled a
large room in a community library and listened to remarks from gun-violence
survivors, community activists and other like-minded folks. What is most
attractive about Shannon’s book is that it is not only a recounting of what she
has accomplished over the last half-dozen years, it’s also a guide to building
your own movement, to pushing your own community forward into making effective
change.
And by the way, with all due respect to the strengths of
women in this regard, my male friends will profit from reading this book too.
