Shannon Watts: How to create an ‘army of angry moms and women’ from your own kitchen

POLITICO's Off Message

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics

4.5 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2018

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

The founder of Moms Demand Action talks about how she created one of the most successful gun control groups in the country—and where they go from here. Shannon Watts has a bodyguard who travels with her. He doesn’t carry a gun—his job is to scope out the local hospitals and know which one to rush her to if she gets shot. That’s been life for the mother of five since late 2012, when she founded Moms Demand Action, an organization that advocates for stricter regulation of guns. Watts says the threats of violence and rape started coming in within 24 hours of the group’s formation. Threatening strangers have shown up at her house. The National Rifle Association regularly features her in its magazine. Right-wing provocateur Dana Loesch, before she went on the NRA payroll, showed up with a camera crew to confront Watts off-guard at a protest she was leading near the NRA’s annual meeting. It all started that day in December 2012 when 20 first-graders were mowed down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and a frustrated Watts wrote a Facebook post about the need for new gun laws. She figured she’d just join a group that existed—something like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, except for gun violence—sign up for a few events, write a check. Instead, sitting at her kitchen table and almost without realizing what she was doing while talking with the fellow mothers who reached out to her, Watts started what has quickly become one of the largest and most far-reaching organizations in American politics and an aspirational model for how a group of like-minded political amateurs can quickly move from liking each others’ social media posts to having a real impact on policy. For more: https://www.politico.com/podcasts/off-message Politico's "Off Message" podcast is hosted by Edward-Isaac Dovere, produced by Zack Stanton, and is a proud member of the Panoply network. Intro/outro music by Podington Bear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. When I look to join an organization in the wake of
0:06.8	Sandy Hook, I could have supported a think tank in D.C. or I could have joined some of these
0:11.1	individual state organizations. Almost all of them run by men. And women are only 20% of Congress.
0:17.6	We only hold about 25% of state legislative seats. We're less than 1% of Fortune 100
0:21.7	CEOs. So we aren't getting to make the laws and the policies that impact the safety of our
0:27.3	families. And I think that women were looking for a way to do this that helped us pull the levers
0:32.1	of power available to us, our votes, because we're the majority of the voting public, our spending
0:36.9	power. We make about 80% of the voting public, our spending power.
0:40.4	We make about 80% of our family spending decisions and our voices.
0:45.4	You know, we show up in meetings and in every single gun bill hearing in this country.
0:48.4	And when lawmakers see us, they're scared.
0:55.0	Today's guest, Shannon Watts, the founder of Mom's Demand Action, which now has over 5 million supporters,
1:02.1	not all of the moms, and 300,000 active volunteers pushing for new gun legislation all over the country and also against legislation backed by the NRA.
1:05.9	None of it existed before the end of 2012 when Watts, angry and frustrated over the Sandy Hook shooting,
1:11.9	started a Facebook page. She wasn't an activist. She'd never been involved in gun legislation
1:17.3	or any other kind of legislation. She didn't know much about politics. But she and a bunch of other
1:22.6	mothers put their frustration and skills to work, concentrated them, and turned it into one of the biggest
1:27.9	activist groups in the country and one of the groups with the most results to show for its
1:31.8	activity. These days, it's become a regular part of politics to see people fighting for the
1:37.1	moms demand action endorsement, wearing the t-shirt with its logo. It all happened very
1:42.2	quickly and in ways no one could predict. So that's why I wanted to have
1:45.9	Watts on, not just because guns have become such a major political issue, but because Mom's
	...

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