Thank the teachers that night you went home and logged into Facebook and wrote a call to action your mom but you're also experience communications for fashion Did you know you were about to start I had no idea absolutely no idea I had gone on line and looked for something like Mothers Against Drunk Driving thinking surely this already exists and it's my moment to get off the sidelines I'm devastated by what's happened I'm angry that I'm seeing pundits and politicians on my television set saying the solution to this crisis is more guns and I'm going to go ahead and join what's already been started and I couldn't find anything I found some mail run think tanks in Washington d.c. I found some one off state organizations also mostly run by men and I knew I wanted to be part of army of women across the country and so I started this Facebook page and I appreciate the compliment about my communications background but the fact that I called at 1000000 moms for gun control should tell you that I was alone in my kitchen and not with a focus group. My daughter who is gay told me hours later that 1000000 Moms was a group trying to get j.c. Penney not to be their spokesperson so that was bad and. I soon after got a call from Representative Carolyn McCarthy whose husband and son were shot on the Long Island Railroad and I'm in my kitchen and get this call from Washington d.c. Area code and I pick it up and she says no one uses the phrase gun control we've been waiting for moms and women to organize across the country but we can't do it with that name so regardless to say we change our name a couple weeks later so what Me Do you think that the rubric of moms in an organization at least initially led by moms could be a game changer. I intuitively felt that women but in particular moms were the year into the gun lobby seeing that the gun lobby had made this group a vocal extreme. A vocal minority afraid their guns would be taken away but 80000000 moms in this country regardless of political party especially that week that day were afraid their children would be taken away and that if we could get together and unite on this issue that we could quickly solve it just like we solve so many issues in this country. You speak about the super power of moms and I think we've seen in this movement and in other political organizing in the last couple years how women use skills that they use in their jobs and their home and maybe never thought that they could use that to effect massive political change tell me what you think those are well 1st of all you know we spend a lot of time negotiating anyone here who has kids whether one you know that that's a big part of your job we spend a lot of time budgeting and planning for family spending and also we're multitasking most photos I mean you know there's nothing I can't do it all at the same time and that really became true when I became a woman and a mom but the other thing is that when you spend any time in the state house you very quickly realize that these are not rocket scientists. I would trust very few of them to get me a cup of coffee let alone make the laws that protect my family and my community and that's why so quickly our volunteers have moved from shaping policy to making it because they they realize that the skills they have as a mom have qualified them to do this job you know it's interesting because throughout you know decades and you know hundreds of years women have really been at the forefront of some of the biggest social changes even when they had no power whether it's abolition or suffrage or temperate or child labor and in fact you know our namesake for Mother Jones I think is worth telling you guys has sort of an interesting corollary terror group she you know she lost her husband and her kids to yellow fever and later became an activist named herself Mother Jones and made herself look older than she really was and kind of dowdy or and wore this sort of already out of style of formal dress her thinking was that no one would be down and grandma at the head of a minor strike or whatever and and I'm wondering in the same way how you think that having an army not only women and not only moms at this point but an army of moms and red shirts. Kind of but to flex that kind of anger and just takes the wind out of protesters counter protesters or perhaps the legislators we are mothers and others at this point I mean we have become sort of the mob of gun safety in fact we're much bigger than most organizations in the country and I think it's because we've built this brand you talk about the red shirts that really make women feel empowered and the other thing we've learned is that motherhood can be used as a weapon against you unless you use it as a tool I can't tell you how many times the gun lobby has attacked me and you know I must drink boxed wine in my driveway and take Xanax and I'm not a real mom and all these insults that are sort of mom centered and woman focused and we have started to take motherhood and use it as a tool we only hold 20 percent of the lawmaker positions in this country we're less than 5 percent of Fortune 1000 C.E.O.'s but when we speak lawmakers listen and we weren't even showing up before so it's not like it's all of these volunteers in red shirts verses in equal number of gun extremists or even enery members it's all of us versus one or 2 gun lobbyists and when when lawmakers see that it makes a difference you know when you guys were 1st going there were certainly a number of high profile instances when moms on chairs were confronted by open carry activists and essentially the visual if for those of you somehow don't remember this was that you know usually a large guys with really large assault weapons confronting you and that just must have been terrifying to you as a leader of an organization as well as terrifying Of course those front line volunteers in organizers do you still face that kind of physical intimidation out there we do open carry is legal in 45 states it's not legal here in the state of California about. Where I live in Colorado you can walk up and down Pearl Street with an air of 15 strapped your chest but not a dog and that's the absurdity of the gun laws in our country and one of the early examples you're talking about are volunteers for if we're having membership lunch in a restaurant they look out the window and 40 people are pulling up in pickup trucks and pulling long guns out of their cars and just holding them in posing with them and waiting for these women to come out of the restaurant and there's nothing the police could do because it's perfectly legal again in $45.00 states and we do still see that I think they realize that was a very bad visual viral and it didn't it didn't do what they had hoped it would do which was to silence and intimidate us it turned on them but even this last weekend it was where Orange and in Ohio a lot of armed men wearing orange showed up again to intimidate and silence us and and when when that happens do you think the visual in the public symphony. Is more likely to go to you because it is mostly a group of women and with that kind of Mom's identifier again I do I think that's why they do it don't do it quite as much as they used to because they realize that it didn't have the impact they wanted it to but that said I also think it's so important to show America what is open carry look like it's how we got Starbucks and so many other companies change their policies because when you see someone with a gun in their pocket or an a r 15 strapped to their chest ordering a latte you realize that there's something very wrong with this country did did those kind of corporate boycotts and corporate movements you guys did see Starbucks or is a Burger King target a person he was not one of. My favorites but there were a bunch of companies in the early days and just to kind of explain the Genesis so I saw on the news that Starbucks was no longer going to allow smoking 20 feet outside of stores and so I. Called and said Will you still allow open carry and they said yes we're still going to follow the law and our volunteers said well we're more afraid of secondhand bullets than secondhand smoke so we embarked on a campaign called Skip Starbucks Saturdays we were too small to do a boycott and even then the soccer moms gave me a really hard time about not having coffee on Saturday. But within 3 months Howard Schultz came out on television said guns are no longer welcome in our stores and we replicated that using hash tag like burritos not bullets for Chipotle a and other companies but that that was the early days when companies did not want to talk about this issue now we have companies like Levis like Dick's Sporting Goods like Tom shoes that are coming to us and saying not only do we want to have the right policies but we actually want to be party or coalition. The the dicks change after Parkland seem like a particularly important corporate cultural shift. I don't know how many folks here have have you know frequent ticks a lot is a great huge massive I mean there's everything in there but the gun section in many or maybe all of them is quite huge this was not a small decision on their part culturally and perhaps for sales What what did you hear about why they did that was a just a sort of post Parkland reaction are they had been leading up to this I think they had been leading up to it and it was certainly Parklane but also many of their employees are based in Pittsburgh and then there was the her at the synagogue so it is been a gradual change but something I think that was turbo charged by these horrific shooting tragedies I think it's incredibly brave they kind of said you know we're not we're not going to sell semiautomatic rifles anymore and then they moved it to well in fact we're actually getting rid of much of the gun sales in across the company and at 1st they suffered financially because of it but they seem to be back on track and they kind of said all along we don't care we want to be on the right side of history on this issue. And the enery knew that it was a huge cultural shift because they attacked them so mercilessly over it but that's how change happens and I'm curious do you see that kind of call corporate leverage being used in the next 2 years or is it did you guys kind of get what you feel you can get on that front right now I mean is that sort of actively a part of what you're looking for we are more these days partnering with companies much like we are creative people and influencers and others who want to come to the table and be part of our coalition I'm still hopeful that someday Kroger's will change its policy that was a campaign we started we lost a couple of those but I do think the future of gun safety will be that companies will do the right thing to protect their customers when lawmakers don't protect their constituents. You personally have faced a lot of threats tell us what you feel comfortable sharing about her within hours the threats of death and sexual violence started against me against my daughter's. Letters e-mails people driving by my house and I can remember called the police in the early days I lived in Indiana and the officer who came to my house said well that's what you get when you mess with the 2nd Amendment. And I realized that I was sort of on my own but also that much like the open carry protests we're talking about that that isn't meant to intimidate and silence me and our volunteers and if we lose our children we have nothing left to lose so we weren't going to do that it's been more interesting since the n.r.a. Is under some I'm sure will talk about the troubles they're experiencing but they started attacking me more and more I think to distract from what they're going through and I mean the death threats in the last 3 weeks have been a reminder of what it was like in the early days it's been that intense but I'm hopeful that it's a good sign that they're losing a lot of their power. And given all that you're still not at all shy about mixing in a bunch Twitter. Why is being so personally visible and confrontational even a good strategy because I get the sense you don't do anything without thinking about its strategic implications you know I'm happy to be the tip of the spear there needs to be someone who will absorb the blows and also correct the n.r.a. Misinformation they have been spreading it for decades and it's almost become part of the American vernacular all of the myths that they've used as propaganda and I think it it is an important role that I play which is to take them on when they are wrong or when they are lying and to point it out the other piece of it is you know after mass shootings for so long people would say oh it's too early to talk about we can't politicize a tragedy I immediately when I start the organization said we're going to talk about this when there is a tragedy because there's no better time to talk about it and it's political because the gun lobby is writing our gun laws and I can remember I mean the blowback I got from the n.r.a. Was so intense and now you know about tonight we're going to talk about it when there's a mass shooting so some of it is that cultural change. You know you I noticed in kind of researching for this that you have no Wicca Pedia page which. I didn't even know I don't think I've ever seen be true for anyone so prominent especially someone in a flashpoint situation is that please don't make war. Yeah I mean so that is not part of a personal security plan or a sort of. Ok I'm just I'm looking I'm intrigued. There are there are some limitations to the mom's brand I mean how can you how do you get over making you know how do you get to the point where you can make common cause for those who are not moms who are maybe Armand's but think this is a group for like weight affluent moms not me how have you bridge that divide so I get asked a lot like why are we parents to be in action or some women demand action that moms was that idea I talked about with taking on the gun lobby but the other piece is because we hold so few positions of power this is the power we can have on this issue this is how we can have a seat at the table and be able to have influence so the name until we're $5050.00 the name isn't going to change but in terms of the piece about diversity it's so important to us both politically but also to have diversity equality and inclusion we've made it a key priority. Imo white suburban mom and I was scared my kids were in school and so many other women who came to the organization after Sandy Hook looked like me so we had to work very hard to diversify For example last year over 40 percent of our new hires were non white but after the purple tragedy we triple the size and the people came into the organization look like me so what I learned was this is a never ending effort that we always have to work on it we just hired the diversity officer from Planned Parenthood Her name's Angela for Elza Bala and she will be doing the same kind of work for months to in action because it is such a priority it's interesting because I think after Parkland. The kids and the movement more broadly really made a concerted effort to be. To make sure that they were talking about the full spectrum of gun violence and how it impacts all kinds of communities. And I'm wondering who for in your organization you think has been the biggest success. Public facing I'm thinking is an obvious one and you know are there others that you feel like are kind of bridging those gaps to some extent Yeah absolutely so in every community wherein we work to partner with the women particularly women of color who have been on the front line of this issue for decades and have been invisible so that we are working together and we're lifting up their work. But I think Lucy make bath has such an important voice because her son Jordan Davis a black teen was shot and killed by a white man because he said his music was too loud and Lucy immediately became an activist with us in Georgia and every time we would talk you know I would say to her so when are you running for office and finally she said she was going to run and she's going to run for Congress and she now holds a seat held by Republicans for 30 years it's Newt Gingrich's old seat and she is a voice for the black men in this country who are 10 times more likely to be shot and killed than their white peers the black boys who are 14 times more likely to be shot and killed than their peers and we are electing more and more women like that in fact one of our volunteers this year was the 1st Muslim ever elected to the Pennsylvania State House and she is a gun violence survivor. Our school shooting. A good idea. You know we everything we do is data and research and we often change our minds or of all the position and one of them has been on this issue. There is 0 data to show that active shooter drills are effective especially for children. There is data that shows they experience depression and anxiety after these drills so we now believe that children should not be involved in active shooter drills and that it is the children of all ages or do you children of all ages but that that teachers that adults if they want to drill that they should. If you look at the drills in this country and how they're evolving it is almost like lawmakers think our teachers are Rambo or school officials again most of our school officials and lawmakers are men most of our teachers are women and there's actually legislation going through in Indiana right now where they're trying to make it so that teachers can be shot with rubber bullets during an active shooter drill so they feel the adrenaline of what that kind of situation would be like it's disgusting and obscene and it just shows you that there is a problem in this country what do you think about the prosecution or prosecution of the school resource officer in Parkland to. You know heard heard the shots were fired and I guess you know the evidence is pointing to the fact that at some point he just decided to pull back and sort of stay safe from self. The victims and the survivors in that shooting almost 100 percent believe that he should have been arrested and that the. Videos and the research showed that he could have saved lives by going it so I support them that said looking at it more broadly as an issue for looking at school resource officers. The idea that we get easy access to arsenals like semiautomatic rifles bulk ammo tactical gear all of these things that are available to civilians and then we ask an s.r.o. To be unafraid or to do their job when they think their job is breaking up fights on a school where it makes no sense to me right I mean it's not like the s. Are are necessary like these AK special forces did trade you know they have a handgun usually probably to the contrary. That's what I'm I'm still curious back to school shooting drills what you guys feel I mean even just about the now in colleges when there have been you know active shooters or they fear that there's one there's a sort of run hide fight tax and you know what level of information or preparation is helpful versus creating unnecessary fear and trauma and even p.t.s.d. Well again these active shooter drills there's no data that shows they're effective . And if adults want to drill that's fine but we have created such a culture of anxiety and fear when really instead of preparing teachers and students to take on active shooters we should be making sure dangerous people don't have easy access to guns right no other country is approaching it in this manner because the gun because too many lawmakers are afraid to stand up to the gun lobby . Salutes Let's talk about some political realities given the the Congress and the State House as we have now I mean in the in the last 5 years ther