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Can mothers take on gun violence with the same impact as drunk driving?

January 18, 2013

Like Mothers Against Drunk Driving helped change lax laws in the 1980s, One Million Moms for Gun Control will not rest until common-sense gun laws are put in place at both the national and state levels. We are the wave of change.

— Shannon Watts, 1MM4GC

©2013 By Petula Dvorak, Washington Post

Laura Wallace sure hopes so

Wallace said she wishes all those first-graders didn’t have to die to finally make other mothers take up her fight. “But in the end, it’s mothers and their kids getting slammed down in all this,” she said. “So it’ll be mothers who get the job done.”
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Laura Wallace’s first reaction was anger.

When a whole class of first-graders was slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School last month, Wallace felt 13 years drain from her soul.

Petula Dvorak, Washington Post columnist

Petula Dvorak, Washington Post columnist

“I was cussing at the television when I saw it. This didn’t have to happen,” she told me, right after she clicked off President Obama’s speech on gun control, tired from her late-night shift as a cook at a halfway house, tired from hearing America grieve again.

Thirteen years ago, she was that grieving mother, crying into her pillow at night, waking up feeling her universe tilted, then realizing it was because she just buried a son.

Her son, Andre Wallace, and his girlfriend Natasha Marsh — both 17 — were gunned down after a fight in their school spilled into D.C.’s streets on a cold, February night.

Wallace, now 50, found a purpose in trying to prevent other mothers from having to walk her path.

Read the entire column at washingtonpost.com

More from: MADD Shannon Watts

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