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 gun regulations.


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 Newtown, Connecticut, and a frustrated Watts wrote a Facebook post about the need for new gun laws. She figured she would 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 mothers who had 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.

Moms Demand Action now has a list of nearly 5 million people who’ve signed up and 300,000 active volunteers—200,000 of whom have joined since the February 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 dead—who fan out to state legislatures every time a gun law comes up for a hearing or vote. By comparison, the NRA’s own membership list has a little more than 5 million, and as Watts likes to point out, Mothers Against Drunk Driving has only 15,000 active volunteers.

By Watts’ count, in this past year’s state and local legislative sessions, volunteers with Moms Demand Action have helped kill 90 percent of NRA-backed bills and passed 1,000 bills of their own. Having the financial and organizational support from being brought into Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety umbrella helps, but mostly, it’s the army of unpaid women on phone and email trees, piling into state capital hearing rooms in matching T-shirts.

“Half the battle in democracy is just showing up. And it’s really painstaking, unglamorous, heavy lifting, if you’ve ever sat at a state House for more than 10 hours. It is not the most fun way to spend your time,” Watts told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “It’s great to have marches and rallies, but you also have to have action. And I think that’s why we’ve been more focused on the organizing part than the marches and rallies, which we did early on, because we realized there was so much power in showing up and in having in-district meetings with federal lawmakers or meeting with state lawmakers, going to local boardrooms and having these discussions. It’s like drips on a rock, but that is ultimately how change gets made.”

Candidates, including some Republicans, are chasing the Moms Demand Action endorsement this year. And 16 gun violence survivors and members are already running with the group’s backing this year, with more expected.

Among them is Amber Gustafson, one of the original Moms Demand Action chapter leaders, who is now running against the Iowa state senate majority leader. Back in 2013, she was one of 60 who went to Colorado for the very first member conference they called “Gun Sense University,” and remembers being told, “We may not be able to make progress with the people that we have in office, and we may not be able to find people who will take this up as a cause—it’s going to have to be us. So start thinking about what office you can run for.”

Click here to subscribe and hear the full podcast, including how Watts picked the title for her book coming out next year and her reading of what’s come out about NRA connections to the Russia investigation.

Now she has internal polling showing her within 3 points of a man who in 2014 ran unopposed, and up by 16 points among the most motivated voters.

“How has this guy fallen ass-backwards into this job and he gets to sit as the Senate majority leader now and bang the gavel, and yet his votes have never been put on trial, and he’s never had to answer for anything?” Gustafson said.

Being part of Moms Demand Action gave her not just a foothold and inspiration, Gustafson said, but a network of supporters she can call on, and an organizing model to emulate as she expands her own political network.

This year’s Gun Sense University starts Friday in Atlanta, twice the size of last year’s event, with more than 1,000 people from 47 states. Among the panels: How to Run for Office, this year run by people who’ve had the experience.

When she started five-and-a-half years ago, Watts was a stay-at-home mother of five, living in suburban Indiana, so politically unsophisticated that she joked about dutifully sending in a $15 donation to the Obama campaign every time she got one of those ‘win a lunch with Barack’ contest emails, really believing she might win. She’d worked in corporate communications for 20 years, and says that experience gave her some know-how on social media and outreach.

Other mothers came in with organizational or design skills. Chapters were established, each with a chapter leader and a circle of supporting moms, each tasked with handling data, membership, survivor outreach and other elements.

“I could have supported a think tank in D.C., or I could have joined some of these individual state organizations, almost all of them run by men,” Watts said. Instead, she helped assemble “an army of very angry moms and women.”

“We aren’t getting to make the laws and the policies that impact the safety of our families. And I think that women were looking for a way to do this, that helped us pull the levers of power available to us—our votes, because we’re the majority of the voting public, our spending power—we make about 85 percent of our families’ spending decisions. And our voices. You know, we show up in meetings and every single gun bill hearing in this country, and when lawmakers see us, they’re scared,” she said.

So for the threats, Watts said, she’s ready to take them. She’s come to accept that this all might end with her getting shot.

“I honestly think that I’m on the right side of history, and, if, God forbid, anything were to happen, I just—it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make,” she said.

But as for running for office herself, Watts said, she doesn’t see it happening.

“I don’t know that I would be able to make more change than I’m able to make doing this.”