The day after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Shannon Watts woke up feeling angry. Like many parents across the United States, the fear of having one's child snatched too soon by senseless gun violence suddenly felt more present than it ever had before. Watts, a mother of five, channeled her feelings of despair into something constructive: First, she scoured the internet for the community she hoped existed, something like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but for gun violence. When she couldn't find it, she started her own.

The group, which is now known as Moms Demand Action, has become a rapidly growing political powerhouse with chapters in every U.S. state. Since the shooting in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, more than 170,000 have reached out wanting to volunteer. In April 2014, Moms Demand Action and Mayors Against Illegal Guns joined forces under the umbrella group, Everytown for Gun Safety, forming the largest gun violence prevention group in the country.

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Watts, as she describes herself in her Twitter profile, is the “bane of NRA‘s existence” — and rightfully so. She has become a punching bag in the eyes of many far-right pundits, but in truth, she is merely another American mother who refuses to live under the corrupt spell that the gun lobby has cast over so many America’s politicians — an incantation that has paralyzed politics and made mass killings seem routine. Salon spoke to Watts about her life, her mission, and her view of the political situation.

There were plenty of other school shootings prior to Sandy Hook, but I’m curious why Sandy Hook was the tragedy that really drove you to take action.

I thought time after time, our lawmakers will do something. They will protect us. I can remember really starting to pay attention just when the Safeway shooting [h]appened in Tucson [where Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot]. I didn’t know what the lawmakers were going to do; one of their own was shot.

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Then Sandy Hook happened. I had been a corporate communications executive for about 15 years, but I had been a stay-at-home-mom for five when Sandy Hook happened. I could remember watching the news and being so devastated, and seeing pundits come on hours after the shooting saying "more guns and fewer gun laws," that that was the solution. The next day I woke up and I was just incredibly angry and agitated. I went online and I looked for something similar to Moms Against Drunk Driving [but for gun violence prevention] and found nothing, so I started the Facebook page and called it One Million Moms for Gun Control. This was before I realized that One Million Moms was an anti-gay group trying to prevent Ellen DeGeneres from being the JC Penny spokeswoman.

I got a call from Representative Carolyn McCarthy. She became a congresswoman because her son and husband were shot on the Long Island Rail Road. She called me and said, “Look, we’ve been waiting for the voice of moms in this country to galvanize around this issue but you’ve got to change your name.” And so we did. What was interesting was that in the days after starting the "organization" — obviously I didn’t know I had [at first], I thought we were just having an online conversation about this issue among moms — suddenly people were calling me because all my information was public and saying, “I want to start a chapter where I live.” That’s really how it turned into an offline movement.

Moms Demand Action is now a force to be reckoned with; the organization has worked to pass background check laws in eight states. You’ve fought against legislations that would force college campuses to allow guns on college campuses, and ones that would allow guns in public K-12 schools. Would you consider Moms Demand Action today to be a political organization?

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We’re nonpartisan, but I know we’ve become a political powerhouse in most state houses across the country. They see our volunteers, and gun violence survivors, show up wearing a red shirt.

[We] showed up en masse yesterday at the state house in Rhode Island. The first couple of years in Rhode Island it was so tough, even the Democrats in Rhode Island were elated by the NRA. Speaker [Nicholas] Mattiello opposed us every step of the way the first couple of years. Yet we gave him all this data to show how gun laws work, especially around domestic gun violence. Guns were not being removed from abusers.

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He helped get a bump stock ban and red flag law passed by the House by an overwhelming majority of votes, with dozens of Moms Demand Action volunteers sitting in the audience. That’s how aggressive activism works. You can’t give up. It’s a marathon and it takes showing up and demanding action every single year in every single state. We show up at every gun control hearing. That’s how you prove yourself and become a political powerhouse.

Can you point to a specific legislation that really surprised you in the beginning throughout your process of learning about America’s gun laws?

First of all I didn’t have any idea that there wasn’t a background check on every gun sale. I assumed you had to have a background check. I didn’t realize there were private loopholes that allowed gun sales at gun shows and online to happen without a background check. I didn’t realize that dating partners and stalkers were not included in the federal definition of prohibited purchasers.

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I had no idea that if you didn’t clear background checks within three days the gun dealer could go ahead and decide to sell you a gun. That’s something we now call the “Charleston loophole” because that’s how the shooter got his gun — a white supremacists got a gun — and shot nine people at a church in Charleston. He had a very complicated criminal history, of course, that took a while to sort through, yet the law allowed that gun dealer to go ahead and sell the gun.

Besides voting, how can constituents take action to disempower the NRA and gun lobbyists?

The first thing is [to] get educated. Though they may say, “We are your candidates, and I’ll make a stand on these issues,” if they have any link to the NRA, that means they probably support arming domestic abusers, or they oppose closing the background check loophole.

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It’s really important to know where your lawmaker stands. The other thing is to make sure that you and your friends and family are registered to vote.

The other piece of this is to get off the sidelines and to get active. There is strength in numbers. The reason that we have become a political powerhouse is because dozens or even hundreds of us show up at gun bill hearings.

At the state level, we show up at every gun bill hearing, good and bad. To show that we’re watching and paying attention and that we’re going to make the lawmakers accountable.

The final piece is to think about running for office. We are training our volunteers to run for office. Thirteen ran in November, and nine won. We have more running in this coming November. State houses in Montana, Iowa, Arizona, Arkansas and more. We did a poll and it showed more than 400 of our volunteers are planning to run in the future.

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More people are paying attention to gun violence and gun control reform today — specifically, young Americans. Did you foresee the recent teen uprising following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida?

I don’t think we foresaw it. I will say that for years we’ve been asked by students to start Students Demand Action. We honestly didn’t have the bandwidth because we were working to mobilize moms mainly and women who I think are the secret sauce to organizing in this country.

If you had seen some of the polling before Parkland, you would have been a little bit concerned about where the next generation stood on this issue. They seemed a little more indifferent. They seemed somewhat libertarian in their views. Yet I do think that you could either say that the polling was maybe biased, or the [questions pollsters asked] were oversimplified... You have to remember there was a school shooting in Kentucky right before Parkland.

I do think they are angry. They are becoming adults and they have been told their whole lives that active shooter drills are no different than fire or earthquake drills. They aren’t acts of nature, they are preventable.

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Parkland helped to galvanize around this issue. Hours after the shooting, teens got a generational call-to-action, but I think teens across the country are taking and running with it in their own ways depending on where they live and what their communities are experiencing. It’s very intersectional and I think that’s exciting.

And now you have Students Demand Action.

Yes, we already have 50, 000 volunteers. They’ll be working in similar ways to Moms Demand Action, but they’ll be creating their own platform that’s age appropriate. In particular, they’ll be focused on registering their peers to vote between elections on this issue.

Can you give me more insight into the conversations at Moms Demand Action around gun violence and feminism?

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I don’t know if you’ve seen Ken Burns' documentary on the prohibition, but it’s really fascinating where they talk about [how] that was really the first time in American history that women were allowed to be activists. Because it was seen as sort of a godly-biblical pursuit to stop people from alcoholism or drinking. It was unacceptable for women to get involved [previously].

But once women got a taste of that, that ability to be politically active, they never stopped—regardless of whether men wanted them to or not. And that includes everything from child labor laws to women’s rights, voting rights, civil rights, all the way up to the water crisis in Michigan. Women have sort of led the charge to protect their families and their communities and I don’t think gun violence is any different.

A gun extremist’s love will never [m]atch a mother's love for her child. That doesn’t mean [our organizing] is just [about] moms — it’s women in general. [If] you compare women in America to our peers in high-income countries, we’re 16 times more likely to be shot.

More than 50 women are shot and killed by current or former intimate partners every single month in this country. I think Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times stated it best: “In other countries, brutish husbands put wives in hospitals; in America, they put them in graves.”

This is a feminist issue, in addition taking on the gun lobby. I knew intuitively that the emotion that had been generated by the NRA to make gun extremists think their guns will be taken away could only be countered by women and mothers in this country who are afraid that our children going to be taken away.

If you look at some of the tactics of the gun lobby and the NRA specifically, they do prey on misogyny, bigotry and racism, to ferment a culture war and the reason that they have to do that is because they have no president in the White House to make into a bogeyman [who will] take away guns, or that [guns] will be registered, or be banned.

They don’t have a president in the White House to make us afraid, so they have to make us afraid of one another. They’ve made me sort of the poster child of their enemy. I guess you would say that I am sort of enemy number one.

Do you ever think about running for office someday?

Yeah. I considered it, but ultimately I just decided that given who is president, and the current Congress, that I could be more effective doing what I’m doing now.

A record-breaking number of women are running for office in 2018. It’s exciting.

I really do think that’s the silver lining of what is happening currently in this country, is that women are feeling emboldened.

At Moms Demand Action, when we give all of these volunteers the tools to understand policy, to canvas and knock doors for candidates, or to fundraise, to hold events, or to go and have advocacy days at the state house, they very quickly realize they want to go from shaping policy to making it. They realize they are just as smart if not smarter than the people that are currently in office and that is very empowering.

I do believe that is the silver lining — we will see much more equality in our state houses in the near future.