She is a prominent presence on social media. When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 with the endorsement of and major donations from gun industry lobbyists, Watts, who had previously used her Twitter feed as a place to politely discuss policy points, dropped the decorum and started gaining thousands of followers. Her public voice became bolder and less apologetic: “@realDonaldTrump didn’t tweet about #SandyHook anniversary or #Aleppo, but tweets when Vanity Fair criticizes Trump Grill,” she wryly observed in 2016. Lately she uses Twitter to highlight instances of “everyday gun violence,” reminding her followers that, for example, homicide is one of the leading causes of death for pregnant women, or that laws prevent the prohibition of guns in rec centers. After the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, students across the country took to legislative offices and the streets to reject platitudes of thoughts and prayers. Moms Demand Action volunteers helped from the sidelines, using their experience getting permits for rallies, and starting their own youth wing, Students Demand Action, which went on to register more than 100,000 voters in the 2020 election cycle. A wave of state gun safety laws passed in the months that followed, and the 2018 midterms later that year became, for many, a referendum on gun violence prevention.
Watts has a term, MOMentum, that she coined in her book Fight Like a Mother to describe the latent power of their base: Women are a majority of the voting population and can exert strong influence when they unite over common interests, like the safety of their children. They make 80% of family spending decisions and can exert serious financial pressure on companies. Especially in Moms Demand’s early days, with the federal legislative response stalled, the organization focused on encouraging companies like Starbucks and Target to ban guns from their premises. They also turned to state legislatures, and in their first year of existence helped pass an assault weapons ban in Maryland.
“Men are afraid of their moms,” Watts tells me. “Eighty percent of the lawmakers in this country are men, mostly white men. So women are not making the policies and the laws that protect our families and our communities. But we do come to the table with certain levers of power, and that moniker of Mom is one of them.”
To frame politics in the context of motherhood is a commitment to nonviolence, as well as a statement of dedication. “After you have a kid, you are a multitasking maniac,” Watts says. “And, you know, your kid gets a fever in the middle of night and it’s exhausting and you’re over it—you don’t leave. I think democracy is much the same way. You kind of have to stay in the fight and stick with it until that kid is better.”
Right now the kid is still not better. On May 24, 2022, a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 children and two teachers on what was supposed to be their last week of school. Two weeks before, 10 people were killed at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo by a white supremacist. There have been more than 500 shootings involving four or more people in the United States in 2022 so far.
