One Million Moms For Gun Control: Origins Of A Movement

When Donna Dees Thomases, creator of the Million Mom March, learned what Watts was doing, she called and offered her blessing. “It’s a relay race,” she says. “And this is the passing of the baton. We will look back on them and say, ‘That was when we finally seized the moment.'”

Founder, Shannon Watts, third from right, leads the first One Million Moms For Gun Control march across the Brooklyn Bridge on Monday.

By Lisa Belkin, The Huffington Post

It began because Shannon Watts didn’t know what to tell her 12-year-old son about Newtown. The boy had been undone by what he still calls “The Batman Shooting” and left a movie theater sobbing a few days after Aurora, certain the man next to him had a gun. After months of therapy and medication he was just getting his balance back. What would she tell him now, Watts wondered, with 20 children dead in their first-grade classroom?

It began because Amy R. heard the news from Newtown over morning coffee in her North Carolina kitchen, and fought the urge to pull her 8-year-old out of school immediately. The more she read, the more she realized “how ignorant I was that so many guns were out there,” she says. Finally, she wiped her tears and brought her son home from school 30 minutes early. “It’s one of those moments when you just need to hold your child.”

Read the entire story at huffingtonpost.com