Shannon Watts: Channeling Her Anger into Change with Moms Demand Action

fifty change Maker, and Glamour Woman of the Year. But Shannon found this work after pivoting not once.

that she made her next pivot. She started a Facebook group with the message that all Americans can and should do more to reduce gun violence. The online conversation turned into grassroots movement, which turned into Mom's Demand Action. During this time, I also started working on gun violence prevention in my pre pivot days, I worked Sandy Hook families, particularly bringing young people into the movement, and we immediately

heard about Shannon's work. Shan I never actually met in person at the time, but we both worked on trying to get Congress to pass universal background checks, which we'll talk about later in the episode. Shannon's inspiring pivots don't seem to be stopping, and she also talks about what's next for her after stepping down as CEO of Mom's

Demand last year. Guns are a uniquely American problem that sometimes feels hopeless when we see headline after headline, but we can make a difference Shannon is a testament to that, and I hope this episode inspires you all to get involved to protect people from gun violence. You can visit our website for organizations to get involved with their contribute to enjoy.

parents knew what to do with that. But even after I was diagnosed, I think because of stigma, you know, they did not agree with the treatment plan, so I just never was treated and it made it really difficult for me to learn. I knew that I was bright, but I was also being told at the same time that I was sort of a failure. Or a disappointment, or that I didn't have the capacity to compete with my peers. And I barely made it through high school.

Thank god for the economics teacher who passed me, because otherwise I would not have I didn't even get a cap and gown because I didn't think I was going to graduate. How did I get into college? I ended up going to community college for a year, and I think my brain started to solidify at that point. You know, I started to understand the workarounds that I needed to do in order to succeed in this system that was not set up for me. And I can remember when

I was basically failing out of high school. You know, my dad came to me and said, why why don't you become an airline attendant? And that's certainly nothing wrong. I mean, that sounds like a very glamorous life. Honestly to me, I might have I might wish I had become an airline attendant in retrospect, but I just felt like they were saying to me that I couldn't go

to college, that I couldn't do it. And my personality is such that no matter how hard it was to get through school, I was going to figure that out. My parents had such low expectations for me, and I was so stubborn and determined that I wanted to go to college. No one went to college on my mother's

side of the family, that was a woman. I come from a very very impoverished family on my maternal side, coal miners in western Kentucky, who many of them didn't even go to high school, and my mom did not go to college. And so I got all a's that first year in community college, much to my parents' surprise, and about a year later, I transferred to the University of Missouri.

for a local newspaper. I was selling ads for a local newspaper in Columbia, Missouri, and there was a you know, back then, we looked in the newspaper for job ads, and there was an ad that said that Governor Carnahan's administration, a democratic administration, was hiring for a speech writer. That sounded very glamorous to me and like something I could do. And so I applied, and I was one of over one hundred applicants, and I made it through the process

and I was offered the job. I made a whopping nineteen thousand, eight hundred dollars a year, but it was a very sought after position. And you know, the lessons I learned in that job have served me throughout my entire life.

moves on interns like it was debauchery. So that kind of also made me think, you know, if these guys can do it, anybody can do it.

with the consequences for years to come. Let us resolve to work together to put the small on the unimportant things aside, focus on the common goal to leave Missouri an even better place for our children to live than it was for ourselves. Thank you.

on crisis management. So there would be a chemical spill in the middle of the night and I would get woken up and I would have to get on a plane and go out and understand what happened. And how do you message this to community members? How do you explain to them, we understand this is a crisis, we care, we're working to fix it, and that became my job. And I wasn't even thirty years old yet, but I did have a gift, I think in part because of my work at the state House. But I knew how

to tell a story effectively. I knew how to message, and I knew how to help clients in part because of holding the hands of state lawmakers through any kind of journey. You know that they were on because of their brand or their business or whatever was unfolding, and that experience certainly is something that is valuable I think in the corporate world.

talk more about when it pertains to gun violence. But I saw this play out over and over again, and this was just as you know, the Internet was coming into play where I was able to track an issue, find the information about it, look at the news coverage, synthesize all of it, and spit back out a strategic plan and cohesive messaging. And it's just something that my brain is wired to do.

in my generation. And and my main focus really in my twenties and thirties was being able to support my family. And it was really sort of a blur the fact that I was having children, that I was working full time that I was married. I think all the fun most people have in their twenty thirties in thirties, I'm having now in my fifties. But my focus in those days was really just how do I keep succeeding so that I can't support my family?

of decades very well. But we just realized at a certain point that we were not going to have the marriage that either of us wanted. And so after we divorced, I ended up meeting my now husband and remarrying. And he had two older children in high school and college, and I had children in elementary and middle school, so it was a very complex dynamic. You know, we wanted to make sure that our family felt like a family.

We wanted our kids to come together, and I just knew there was no way that I could keep working full time and do that, and it seemed like a good time to take a break, and so I just decided I would step back from the day to day, always imagining that it would be about a five year break and that I would certainly go back into the workforce full time.

my priority. And my husband was working full time. I had a little bit of a luxury to say, Okay, I can put this on the back burner and go back when I'm ready, but always believing that because of my personality, because of the career I had created, I would go back.

in my primary bedroom. As you can imagine, like laundry is a full time job when you have five kids, and I was just I was going to have CNN on the background while I fulded close and suddenly there was this breaking news chirn that there was an active shooter inside in elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. I had

never heard of Newtown, Connecticut. But I knew based on the footage I was seeing of people in the parking lot and families crying, and these reporters who were already on the scene, that this was horrific.

there have been so many mascul shootings since. But you know that twenty children and six educators were slaughtered inside in American elementary school in seconds. Because this, you could call him a man, but he's really he was barely a man who had easy access to a weapon of war.

I went to bed that night, I woke up the next morning, and I'm not even sure I can explain to you the rage I felt, which is sort of a common denominator in my life, Like my go to emotion is anger pretty much for anything good or bad. And I was so angry that I didn't really know what to do with it. I had to channel it, and I thought, okay, I'll join something like Mother's against drunk driving, but for gun safety, that's got to exist. Mad was so influential to me as a teen in

the eighties growing up. You know, they used to park the cars, the crumpled cars full of victims block still like in front of your high school, to say like this could happen to you if you drink and drive, which just was like very impactful, and I thought, there's got to be a group of moms who are doing this for gun safety. You know, I'm a mom of five. That's how this issue speaks to me. It was in an elementary school. I've got kids in an elementary school.

So I went in my kitchen and I looked for this organization, and I could not find anything like it. I found some think tanks, mostly run by men. I found some one off city and state organizations mostly run by men. Like I wanted to be part of a badass army of women like I had seen when I was growing up in Rochester, New York, who I think are the special sauce of forcing change in this country.

I had seventy five Facebook friends. I was not exactly a social media phenomenon, and I just thought I know how to start a Facebook page. I'd actually just recently learned how to start a new Facebook page for like a business or a brand. So I created it in my kitchen and I called it one Million Moms for Gun Control. And it was like lightning in a bottle. The direct messages, the texts, the emails, the calls. Like

I didn't think I'd be a public figure. All my information was out there to contact me, and so what I thought was an online conversation very quickly became an offline organization.

because of that. So many women that day in the days after came to me and said, I want to do this too, I want to do it where I live. Let me help you. The skill set I brought to the table with storytelling and communications and messaging, but I needed web developers and I needed strategists, and I needed organizers, and I needed litigators and trademark lawyers like you name it. These women came and they brought their skills to me and said, I want to help you in any way

I can. So it was really this community effort to create our strategy and our plan that I would say, you know, started to solidify in the days and the weeks that winter. I mean, we showed up in mass all over the country on January twenty sixth at marches and rallies, and I kind of thought, Oh, this is

what we do. We're going to show up. But legislative sessions started just two months after the Sandyek school shooting, and then it became apparent, oh no, we actually need to show up in state houses where the gun extremists have been writing all the policies that are resulting in these mas school shootings. So it all happened very very quickly, but only because of this huge amount of support that I had from complete strangers all over the country.

Congress will pass this legislation. And I was in the Senate gallery when it failed by a handful of votes in the Senate that March, including some Democratic senators who voted against it.

to this bill failing. And at the same time, I was getting all these texts and these dm from volunteers across the country who were saying, it's okay, my governor wants to pass gun safety legislation or my lawmakers want to act in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. And then at the same time, I was getting messages from volunteers that were saying, my governor, my lawmakers actually want to loosen our laws. So that's why it's even more important

than we stick around. So that's how we decided to keep going, which actually became our mantra as an organization, and many of our volunteers have had that tattoo on them, this idea that we have to loose forward, that we are going to have a lot of losses. And one of the things that loss taught us was if we could peel Democrats away on this issue, we would eventually win.

Because what happened was the NRA gave A ratings to all the lawmakers who voted against that background check bill, and these Democrats who voted with them to protect their A rating learned a really important lesson that next election cycle, which is with friends like the NRA, who needs enemies. The na went in and invested millions of dollars in their competitors, their Republican competitors. Not a single one of the Democratic senators who voted against that bill, which was

called the Mansion Toomy Bill, still has their seat. So what Democrats realized was we can vote with our constituents, We can vote our conscience and still keep our jobs because we have this army of women in red shirts who will support us.

speech and right action. It helped me, I think to maybe the overarching thing here is that it helped me keep my ego in check and to realize that this organization, this work was not about me. It was not even about my leadership. It was out the volunteers and the survivors who came into this space. It's the same thing that helped keep me kind and compassionate online. It's the same thing that helped me realize, you know, our message has to be broadly appealing, that we have to be

emboldening and empowering women. And so I think the two things were incredibly important to one another. And I kind of look back and see my leadership of Mom's to Man action as part of my practice right to follow that eightfold path that Buddhism lays out for me.

seismic shift in American politics on this issue. As I mentioned, a quarterball Democrats in Congress had an A rating from the NRA when I started doing this work. Today not one does, and in fact, fifteen Republicans voted for the bipartisan Saber Communities Act that passed last summer. It was the first federal legislation on gun safety and a generation to be signed into law by a president. So all of these things are unbelievable that they've happened in under

a decade. You don't see that on many political issues. And it's also how these issues play out. You know, the idea that you're going to have wholesale, significant change overnight is not realistic. I think incrementalism gets a dirty is seen as a dirty word sometimes, but it's what leads to revolutions. If you learn how to play the long game, and you show up over and over again,

you will evenge will he win? And there's certainly a lot more that has to be done on this issue going forward at a state level, at a federal level. But I think the fact that we've built this foundation means that when we elect a majority of gun sense advocates, we can have pretty quick change. I'll give you an example. I mean in Virginia, which was a very red state until it flipped in twenty nineteen, we elected a gun

sense trifecta. We've passed over a dozen good gun laws in that state, and even though there's a Republican governor now, none of that progress has been rolled back because it's what the people want and they're holding their lawmakers accountable. And we've elected now gun sense trifectas in places like Massachusetts and Michigan and Minnesota, and those are the places

where we are passing strong gun laws. So we have to keep building the foundation and electing the lawmakers who will do what citizens want.

Which you know, this was just after starting mom'ster Man Action. I didn't have any money to give her. I didn't have any other spokespeople. I didn't even know what that meant, but she said yes. And really, the whole reason our Florida chapter started was to support Lucy during the two trials of her son's murderer. The first one was a mistrial, and then Lucy became a colleague. We hired her to work on this issue, particularly as it pertained to religious communities,

and then she eventually decided to run for office. But the role that Lucy has played in my life and in the development of Mom's Manact that was so important was that she was the person who came to me and said, you can't just care about school shootings. You can't just care about mass shootings. You know, I'm so grateful to have this opportunity to speak about my cause and my son, but when I do that, it's mostly

to white women. And if we don't diversify our volunteer base and our own internal leadership, we will not succeed, like we will not last into perpetuity. And really made it her mission to help me do that with Mom's me in Action, which I think we've been successful doing.

It's keeping guns out of schools in the first place. But it's also background checks. It's also storming domestic abusers. It's also unlocking dollars for community violence intervention programs. Right, gun violence is happening everywhere all the time. One hundred and twenty people are shot and killed every day, hundreds more are wounded. That's a lot of mass shootings in

one day in America that aren't happening inside schools. So I think it's first of all, understanding the issue, understanding the data behind the solutions, advocating for more than just your own security and your own kids protection, and realizing that you have to find a piece of the work and take it on. I realize we don't lead single issue lives, but I am a single issue voter. If you don't support gun safety, you're not getting my vote, and that is how we affect change.

in our schools since, but we're starting from scratch. So give us advice, like how should we be thinking about this, How should we prioritize our time, Like how do we feel like we're making progress enough to keep people engaged? Because it is going to be a log paddle. I think it's first setting the table and explaining that to people. People get involved in activism, especially young people, which we need right We need their desire for significant overnight change

to force politicians. We need their voices, we need the way they advocate differently to be at the table. But at the same time, we need to have a realistic expectation of what we can accomplish. We aren't going to have this happen in the next year or two years. We have to have people understand that what they're doing is building a foundation that we can work on. What we want is for all lawmakers to be on the right side of this issue, regardless of political party. So

I think that is this idea of keep going. You may lose, you're going to learn from those losses and win the next time. I think it's understanding the context of history and the fact that we are getting Republicans to vote the right way on this issue, and that if they don't, we have to hold them accountable. Or it looks as though there's no accountability for being on the side of gun extremism. But mostly it's find a piece of this work that you're passionate about and commit

to it. It can be cultural, like handing out secure storage information at a farmer's market. It can be electoral, like knocking doors during election season. It can be legislative. Maybe you're going to show up at a gun bill hearing at the state House. I think it's Alice Walker who said activism is the rent I pay to live

on the planet. And if we are concerned about this issue, if we are worried not just about our kids' safety, but the safety of our communities, the safety of our country, the safety of our democracy, which guns makes vulnerable, then we are obligated to keep showing up and to keep doing the work.

sit in on one of his roundtables about guns. The day of the Sandy Hook School shooting commemoration, invited Wayne Lapierre to the White House Christmas Party, like it looked like this was going to be the nre's time to shine, and in fact, thanks in large part to the work of Mom's Man Action volunteers, the NRA lost political power and wealth and unbelievable amounts during Donald Trump's administration, in

part because gun sales went down. No one is afraid at that moment until COVID that their guns were going to be taken away, but also because Americans started to see through the corruption and the lies of the so called nonprofit So I really thought that that was going to be the beginning of the end for maybe gun safety, but in fact it was for gun lobbyists.

This is the bookend to my activism as the founder of Mom's Demand Action, and it was time for me to step back. And we had this amazing woman in place in our organization who was in charge of movement building, Angela Farrell Zabala. We hired her from Planned Parenthood a few years earlier, and I just think it's so key to the evolution of the organization. You know, I started this organization as a white suburban mom who's afraid her

kids weren't safe in their school. Angela is a black queer woman, a mom of four in Washington, d C. Who has seen gun violence very differently in her community. And I'm incredibly grateful for her service. And I know that she will take the organization in a direction that I wouldn't necessarily have known to do, and I think that benefits the organization.

But I will never not be involved in helping other women run because what I have seen over and over again is that when women are given a seat at the table, everything changes. Everything the issues that they focus on, the lives of the people they serve, even the decorum and the dignity with which we make laws changes when we elect women.

You can also follow her on Twitter, where she is a self proclaimed keyboard warrior, at Shannon R. Watts or on Instagram also at Shannon R.