The Mothers know this all too well. Consider the story of Annette Nance-Holt. She worked hard to rise through the ranks of the Chicago Fire Department, becoming a battalion chief. She and her ex-husband, Ron, a Chicago police commander, did everything they could to give their son, Blair, a safe, comfortable, middle-class life. They taught him to be generous and humble, and to feel grateful for all he had. By the time he was sixteen, Blair was a kind, hardworking, music-loving high school student on the honor roll. He was planning to go to college to study business, the first step to accomplishing his dream of being in the music industry.
Even though Annette and Ron devoted their lives to keeping their city safe, in the end, they couldn’t protect their beloved child. One day in 2007, Blair was riding a public bus from school to his grandparents’ store, where he sometimes helped out. A young gang member opened fire on a group of teenagers, aiming for someone in a rival gang. A friend sitting next to Blair jumped up to run to the back of the bus, but Blair pushed her back into the seat. He saved her life, but was killed himself.
All the mothers around the table with me that day in Chicago had stories like that. And they each had decided to do whatever she could to protect other children from suffering the fate of their own. They were focused intensely on curbing gun violence, reforming policing, and ensuring accountability for these deaths. Sybrina Fulton founded the Trayvon Martin Foundation to support families and to advocate for gun safety reforms. Geneva Reed-Veal, whose twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Sandra Bland, died after being jailed for a minor traffic violation, redoubled her community work through her church. All of the mothers were discovering that their stories and moral authority could make them powerful public advocates. As Cleo Pendleton put it, “When I found my voice, I couldn’t shut up.”
But progress was far too slow. They were understandably frustrated by how hard it was to even get a hearing from local authorities and the U.S. Justice Department, let alone action. Too many of them had been brushed off or insulted, and even attacked in the media. Sybrina and her ex-husband had to listen to their son’s killer tell the press they “didn’t raise their son right” and later make a small fortune auctioning off the gun that killed Trayvon.
“We need better laws,” Gwen Carr told me. “If there’s a crime, there should be accountability, whether you wear blue jeans, a blue business suit, or a blue uniform. We need accountability across the board, and we’re not getting that.”
The others agreed, and they clearly weren’t sure I’d turn out to be any different from the other politicians who’d already let them down. Still, they had accepted my invitation to this meeting in Chicago and were generous with sharing their stories. Now they were waiting to see what I’d do.
Lezley McSpadden was direct with me. Her eighteen-year-old son, Michael Brown, was shot and killed in 2014 by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. “Are we going to see change?” Lezley asked. “Once again we’re around a table, we’re pouring our hearts out, we’re getting emotional, we tell you what we feel—but are we going to see any change? Are we going to see some action?”
The politics of guns have been toxic for a long time. Despite the fact that, according to a June 2017 Quinnipiac University poll, 94 percent of Americans support comprehensive background checks for gun sales, including 92 percent of gun owners, many politicians have shied away from taking on the NRA. The vocal minority of voters against gun safety laws have historically been more organized, better funded, and more willing to be single-issue voters.
In the 1990s, my husband fought hard to pass both a ten-year ban on assault weapons and the Brady Bill, which, for the first time, required background checks on many gun purchases at federally licensed firearms dealers. In the years since, that law has blocked more than two million purchases by convicted felons, domestic abusers, and fugitives. The NRA funded an intense backlash to the new safety measures and helped defeat a lot of Democratic members of Congress in the disastrous 1994 midterm elections. Then, in 2000, the NRA helped beat Al Gore.
After these searing political experiences, it became conventional wisdom that it was safer for Democrats to say nothing at all about guns and hope the NRA stayed away.
I never agreed with this approach. I thought it was wrong on the policy and wrong on the politics. I’ve always hated gun violence on a gut level and was proud that Bill’s administration had taken on the NRA and won. My commitment to stopping senseless gun violence deepened after going to Littleton, Colorado, in 1999. Bill and I visited with grieving family members of teenagers killed in the Columbine High School massacre. We huddled together over coffee cups and memorial books in a local Catholic church. I had thought about those kids every day since I’d heard the news a month earlier. I was especially moved by the story of seventeen-year-old Cassie Bernall. Press accounts at the time said that one of the student-killers asked her if she believed in God. After Cassie said yes, he shot her. When I met Cassie’s mother, Misty, I gave her a big hug and asked her to tell me about her daughter. We sat down together and started looking at photos. Some of the Columbine families talked to Bill and me about what more could be done to keep other schools and families safe from gun violence. I believed we needed new measures that would go even further than what the Clinton administration had accomplished.
Later, as a Senator, I represented rural upstate New York as well as the cities. I understood and appreciated the perspective of law-abiding gun owners wary of any new regulations. I remembered my father teaching me to shoot in rural Pennsylvania, where we spent summers when I was growing up. I also lived in Arkansas for many years and went on a memorable December duck hunting expedition with some friends in the 1980s. I’ll never forget standing hip deep in freezing water, waiting for the sun to rise, trying to stave off hypothermia. I did manage to shoot a duck, but when I got home, Chelsea, who had just watched Bambi, was outraged by the news that I’d shot “some poor little duck’s mommy or daddy.”
These experiences reinforced for me that, for many Americans, hunting and gun ownership are ingrained in the culture. Many see them as links to our frontier past and to the age-old American ethic of self-reliance. For a lot of people, being able to own a gun is a matter of fundamental freedom and self-defense. It’s also a source of security and confidence in a chaotic world. I understand all that. It’s why this issue is so emotionally charged. For people on both sides of the debate, it’s intensely personal.
In all my political campaigns, I’ve done my best to strike a fair balance between standing up for commonsense gun safety measures and showing respect for responsible gun owners. I’ve always said that I recognize the Second Amendment and have never proposed banning all guns.
Yet, even before I got into the 2016 race, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre promised his organization would “fight with everything we’ve got” to stop me from becoming President. He warned that if I won, it would mean “a permanent darkness of deceit and despair forced upon the American people.” All he was missing was a tinfoil hat.
Wayne LaPierre helped make the NRA one of the most reactionary and dangerous organizations in America. Instead of being concerned with the interests of everyday gun owners, many of who support commonsense safety protections, the NRA has essentially become a wholly owned subsidiary of the powerful corporations that make and sell guns. Their bottom line and twisted ideology are all that matters to them, even if it costs thousands of American lives every year.