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Gun-Control Advocate Looking for a Million Good Moms

January 21, 2013

When you see 6- and 7-year-old babies shot 11 times in a classroom, a place we consider a safe haven, that’s a tipping point. The N.R.A. outlined how they saw the vision of America. That future is everyone is armed and the bad guys shoot it out with the good guys over our children’s heads. That’s not tenable, and it’s not the American way.

— Shannon Watts, Founder, One Million Moms For Gun Control

©2013 By JAMES BARRON, The New York Times

Shannon Watts of Zionsville, Ind., did not want her 12-year-old son to hear about the Sandy Hook massacre. The memory of what had happened last summer after the movie theater shootings in Aurora, Colo., was too raw.

“The time has come, just like in the 1980s when the time was right for Mothers Against Drunk Driving,” Ms. Watts said. “We need MADD for gun control.”

“The time has come, just like in the 1980s when the time was right for Mothers Against Drunk Driving,” Ms. Watts said. “We need MADD for gun control.”

The day after the Colorado shootings, her son Sam went to see “The Dark Knight Rises,” the same Batman movie that had been playing when James E. Holmes opened fire, killing 12 people and wounding 58 others. Sam had what Ms. Watts described as a panic attack.

“He became obsessed with the idea that the person next to him had a gun,” she said, adding that he was soon afflicted with nervous tics and had a hard time sleeping. He has since seen a psychologist, she said.

Ms. Watts’s first response to word of the carnage at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., was: “We can’t let Sam know.” Her second response was to start a grass-roots group, One Million Moms for Gun Control, to press for more effective firearms legislation and for what she called “a sensible interpretation of the Second Amendment.”

Read the entire story at nytimes.com

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