In the wake of the massacres in Aurora and Newtown, a concerned mother from Zionsville, Indiana has started a group called One Million Moms for Gun Control. Shannon Watts's 12-year-old son Sam attended a screening of Dark Knight Rises a day after the Aurora movie theater shooting, and she tells City Room that during the movie he "became obsessed with the idea that the person next to him had a gun." Now he has nervous tics and insomnia, and is seeing a psychologist. Watts, for her part, has thrown herself into the movement for what she calls "a sensible interpretation of the Second Amendment.” This morning she joined other motivated moms and kids for a march across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall.

Most of the One Million Moms actions will take place on Saturday, so its understandable that this morning's preliminary march fell a few hundred thousand short of a million. The group is co-sponsoring Saturday's March on Washington for Gun Control in Washington, DC, and local rallies are planned for cities across America that day. But today about two hundred participants marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and held a rally at City Hall, where Watts and others gave speeches intended to highlight New York State's advances in gun control legislation. "New York’s success in passing a gun-control bill should serve as an example for Congress," Watts told the Times during her interview.

In a Huffington Post editorial, Watts writes, "Much like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was started to address the deadly dangers of driving while intoxicated through public education programs and lobbying for stricter state and federal regulations, One Million Moms for Gun Control was born to fight for common sense gun control regulations.

"Let me be clear: we do not stand for a ban on guns. We stand for our right to protect our children. Our middle-ground solutions to the escalating problem of gun violence in the United States are straightforward:

Ban assault weapons and ammunition magazines of more than 10 rounds.

Require background checks for all gun purchasers.

Report the sale of large quantities of ammunition to the ATF.

Limit the scope of concealed weapons laws at the state level.

"The Second Amendment does not make this an "either/or" conversation: Americans can own guns and be responsible; our children can go to school and feel safe; and we can enact gun control laws and honor our forefathers."

CBS2 reports that the rally began with the rendition of “26 Names” by Tony-nominated actress Montego Glover; the song features the Newtown victims’ names set to music by composer Jason Robert Brown. One of today's marchers, Brooklyn resident Dot Cates, told CBS, “I feel like we can’t just step back when things like this are happening, massacres are happening, a school was attacked and many children were killed so something has to be done and I think it’s a first step."

Ray Kelly was also in attendance at this morning's City Hall rally, telling the protesters, "assault weapons are only a fraction of the problem. In NYC it's handguns."