A Force Of Nurture Readies For Battle
By Megan Rosenfeld
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday , March 23, 2000 ; C01
It had to be mothers who'd think of the march, they believe, mothers who are passionately, painfully, overpoweringly angry. Nearly 12 children age 19 and younger are killed every day, they
say--shot by each other, by adults, by themselves. Now the mothers want, no, demand that something be done about guns. And to deliver that plea, they are coming here on Mother's Day, by the
thousands. They're calling it the Million Mom March.
They talk about the mother lioness syndrome, a sleeping giant of fierce maternal rage that will spark such convincing passion that lawmakers will be seduced away from the clutches of the National
Rifle Association and create "sensible gun control." They predict they'll produce the largest demonstration for gun control ever, most of it here on the Mall, but also in 20 cities across the country.
When they first announced the march last Labor Day, the MMM phone rang into one answering machine in New Jersey, with two grandmothers transcribing messages. Now there are volunteers
nationwide, and they have a suite of rented offices here on 17th Street with 15 lines and a voice mail system. On Feb. 28 they had 15,000 hits on the Web site; two days later there were 76,000. The
moms are coming.
Some have cried watching the stories on television. Others have been the mother on television, stunned with grief and disbelief. Or maybe worse: mourning a gunshot death that was considered too
ordinary, too commonplace to warrant the attention of the media.
Donna Dees-Thomases had enough when she saw the television news footage of toddlers leaving the Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, Calif., after a white supremacist sprayed it with
bullets last August. She started making calls, and within days came up with the idea of the Million Mom March, for "mothers, grandmothers, foster mothers and anyone who has ever had a mother."
Vicki King got angry--and scared--after she looked out the window two years ago and saw a high school student showing a gun to friends on her Silver Spring lawn. She imagined a bullet coming
through the window and hitting her 3-year-old, who was eating his lunch in the kitchen. She thought to herself: There are guns everywhere. She is now national volunteer coordinator for the march,
working mostly out of her home basement office.
For Carole Price, the time came on Aug. 20, 1998, when her oldest child, John, 13, was killed by a 9-year-old friend playing with a gun in Baltimore County. Eleven guns were found in the house
where the shooting occurred--on closet shelves, in a duffel bag under a bed. Neither of the men who lived in the house was held accountable.
"They talk about their Second Amendment rights. Well, my son had a right to live," says Price, who gave up her career as a bartender to volunteer full time for gun control. In December, King asked
her to take over as Maryland state coordinator for the march.
Tina Jackson's son was shot to death Nov. 13, 1998, in Washington; she and her friend Claudette Perry organized a D.C. march meeting earlier this month. Julie Bond of Hamilton, Va., lost her son
Jesse, 18, last June; he killed himself.
"He was a wonderful, sensitive young man who had the graduation blues and access to a gun," she wrote on the millionmommarch.com Web site.
There are other postings:
Joan Peterson, Duluth, Minn.: "I will never forget the phone call on Aug. 6, 1992, telling me that my sister, Barbara Lund, had been found shot to death by her estranged husband. . . ."
Leslie Willis-Lowry, Philadelphia: "On February 2, 2000, my son, Songha Thomas Willis, was fatally shot in a holdup while visiting me in Philadelphia. . . . He was a good person who contributed
positively to society. . . . His senseless killing at 27 years of age has left an unimaginable pain in my heart. . . ."
Victoria R. Ballesteros, Los Angeles: "My 8-month-old son has become my life's inspiration. When he was born, my mother said to me 'Los quieren tantos que ni quieres que el viento les pegue.'
Translation: You love them so much that you don't even want the wind to hit them.' She was right. On Mother's Day 2000 I will march with my mother and my three sisters, along with our husbands
and children to say to Congress 'Ya basta! Enough is enough!' There is no love like that of a mother, and our passion will be our 'weapon' against intransigent purveyors of violence and
destruction."
Of course, they are not the only people who feel passionately about this issue.
The Opposition
Melinda Gierisch is one face of the Million Moms' opposition. She is 30, and carries a stylish DeSantis handbag, inside which there is usually a Sig Sauer P245 pistol. Gierisch is one of the
Second Amendment Sisters, a group organizing a counter-demonstration on the Mall on Mother's Day. (Originally called Moms 4 Guns, they were persuaded by childless women like Gierisch to
be more inclusive.)
On most Fridays she goes with 12 to 15 friends to shoot at a range in Northern Virginia; afterward they go out to dinner. Under Virginia law, they cannot carry their pistols in a concealed fashion in
a place that serves alcohol, but they can carry or holster them openly as long as they don't drink. "People usually think we're cops," she says.
Gierisch also owns two hunting rifles (she has bagged two deer) and several pistols of different calibers, as well as an AR-15 semiautomatic, the civilian version of an M-16. She keeps them all in a
locked gun safe bolted to the wall of her Sterling town house.
"If you shoot well, there's a meditative feeling about the experience," she says. "You have to control your breathing, and focus your concentration intently. There's a real feeling of satisfaction when
the bullet hits the mark."
With each gun purchase, she filled out the required state and federal paperwork and waited a week to be approved. She did not find this processing onerous, but is nonetheless opposed to any form
of gun control because she believes it opens the door to gun confiscation. The argument that shooters should be regulated to at least the same extent as drivers leaves her cold. "Driving is a
privilege," she says. "Shooting a gun is a right."
Gierisch is a busy woman. In addition to her job at Logicon as a computer program designer, she belongs to a horseback search-and-rescue organization called Trail Riders of Today (TROT). She's
a member of the Loudoun County Republican Committee and a supporter of presidential candidate Alan Keyes. She rides her horse several times a week, works for a dealer at weekend gun shows,
and goes to hunts and shooting meets with her boyfriend and other shooter friends.
None of the remedies proposed by the MMM or other gun control advocates--starting with licensing and registration--would save anyone's life, she says. She supports enforcement of federal gun
laws to deter criminal behavior, and points to the successful Project Exile pilot program in Richmond, which its proponents say has reduced the murder rate there by one-third by increasing
enforcement of existing gun laws.
"It's always been easy to get a gun in this country," she says. "The question is: What has changed with youth that makes them want to kill?"
The statistic promoted by the Second Amendment Sisters for their counter-march--called Armed Informed Mothers' March, or AIMM--is that "every 13 seconds an American gun owner uses a
firearm in defense against a criminal." The march will feature women who have used a gun in self-defense.
AIMM is not as ambitious or as well organized as the MMM. It also has a Web site (www.sas-aim.org), a toll-free number (877-271-6216) and about 20,000 "signatures" posted on an online
petition. AIMM is estimating a crowd of 1,000 to 10,000 and need to raise about $14,000, according to organizer Juli Bednarzyk. Requests for underwriting from the NRA and the Gun Owners of
America have been turned down, says Gierisch, so whatever her group collects will be in small contributions. The organizations told her that rallies are not in their programs, she says.
But like the MMM, the members of AIMM want to continue their efforts after the emotion of Mother's Day has passed. Says Dianne Sawyer of Columbia, S.C., of the AIMM steering committee:
"Women are a vulnerable part of our society and have a right to self-defense."
The Preparations
A dozen MMM volunteers gathered recently at the newly rented offices for a big moment: A marcher mom was going to be on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" pushing the march. This was publicity
most causes can only dream about.
It's one thing to think of a catchy title and launch your march. Actually making it happen is quite another.
From the outset the MMM was gifted in having Dees-Thomases as its founder. She's a mother of two who lives in Short Hills, N.J., and works part time as a publicist for "Late Show With David
Letterman." She is not only well connected but is also well versed in how to pitch an idea and inject humor into a potentially grim crusade.
"I couldn't organize a class picnic," she insists. "What I contribute is the sound bite."
She calls gun shows "Tupperware parties for criminals."
She noticed that the date of the march was nine months from the Labor Day announcement--enough time for Congress to "deliver" legislation.
Formerly with "CBS News With Dan Rather," she was able to announce the march on "CBS News: This Morning." And her sister-in-law is Clinton campaign veteran Susan Thomases, who gave
her excellent advice. "She said it's a great idea, and make sure you get a good lawyer and a good accountant."
Dees-Thomases and her fellow activists got a toll-free number (888-989-MOMS) and started publishing a chatty newsletter. They added features such as a "time-out chair" to their Web site;
occupants have included gun control opponents Dan Quayle, National Rifle Association Chairman Wayne LaPierre and House Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Tex.).
The instructions to local coordinators on "Working With Your Local Media" are very savvy, backed with bountiful statistics and reports, and the organization's effort to get volunteers to Stay on
Message has been largely effective despite the predictable disagreements.
"One mother wanted us to have a message about breast-feeding, because she felt that lack of breast-feeding was what was causing criminal behavior," says King, a lawyer who has limited her
practice to part-time pro bono work since her first child was born seven years ago. "We had to start limiting the e-mail list."
They really feel they're on the verge of making major waves. "This will be the largest demonstration for gun control in American history," predicts Andrew Maguire, director of the Bell Campaign, a
gun control organization modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Dees-Thomases asked Bell to be the "fiscal sponsor," and so far Maguire has raised about $400,000 of the $800,000 to $1 million needed. Some $300,000 has come from a collaborative to prevent
gun violence funded by philanthropists Irene Diamond and George Soros. The rest is trickling in at the rate of $10,000 to $15,000 a week, boosted by the Rosie O'Donnell appearance March 8.
The message was honed very carefully. The group is seeking "sensible" gun control, not "strong" gun control, as some factions wanted. And they are not, as a group, against hunting.
"I do not own a gun," says Carole Price. "But I wouldn't want to live in a country where somebody told me I could not own a gun. We're not gun grabbers."
Recently, MMM has hired professional organizers and public relations specialists--resulting in a bit of a culture clash as they move in on the women who have gotten the enterprise this far on their
unpaid energy.
And tension surfaced recently when the largely suburban, white moms began organizing inner-city black women, who feel the suburbanites have ignored urban casualties for years, and got excited
only when white children began getting murdered.
"We all know the history of race relations in America. There is nothing that's new on that," says Sultana E. Gorham-Bey, the newly volunteered D.C. coordinator. "But we've got to bury the hatchet
and feel one another's pain in such a way that we rise over the separatism."
Dees-Thomases says the inner-city mothers have a right to feel some resentment. "They're right--shame on us that we haven't been there earlier."
Despite the arrival of the professionals, the group is still fueled largely by grass-roots passion. Michelle Gilbreath from Reston takes her computer and homemade cookies to community events and
gives Power Point presentations. Carole Price has mailed 175 letters to PTAs and 500 letters to inner-city Baltimore leaders from a list she got from the NAACP, and has corralled the governor,
lieutenant governor and attorney general of Maryland into a supportive press conference. Suburban Maryland members of Congress such as Republican Connie Morella and Democrat Al Wynn
have also been enlisted. (Virginia's governor is a member of the NRA.)
Politicians seem to be jumping on the gun control bandwagon all over the place. Hillary Rodham Clinton has announced she will attend the march, and President Clinton has stepped up his gun
control campaign. Republican Gov. George Pataki of New York unveiled a sweeping proposal calling for reforms like mandatory trigger locks. Even Smith & Wesson recently agreed to begin
adding trigger locks, child-proofing and other smart-gun technology to its new models.
But no politicians will be allowed to speak at the Mother's Day rally unless they have suffered personally from gun violence. The speakers will be witnesses, people whose loved ones have been
killed or maimed by guns.
A lot of marchers will not be in that sorrowful category, but they will no doubt echo the words of another writer on the MMM Web site, who identified herself simply as "Margaret of MI." "I have
no story about a gun-related death," she wrote. "I want to keep it that way."
