Moms Demand Action seems to have a lot of disheartened and discouraged members at the moment. The group recently posed several questions from its "Donor Insight Panel" to executive director Angela Ferrell-Zabala, including "Moms Demand Action has been working to end gun violence for over a decade, but gun violence continues to be a problem in our country. I’m so discouraged. Is anything working?" and "I live in an area where there is little political will to make change, and it feels like gun violence prevention will never catch on. How do I continue to fight when my legislators will never agree with me?"
Ferrell-Zabala responded with happy talk about the need for "holistic change" and "finding joy and filling my cup", but her truly cringe-inducing comment came in response to an anti-gun mom who asked, "what previous movement(s) would you look back on to draw parallels and to learn from to address the urgency of now?"
Ferrell-Zabala's response was extraordinary:
I look back to the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement, the fight for marriage equality—moments in history when ordinary people came together against enormous odds.
These were long, difficult, and often painful struggles. The people leading them didn’t know exactly what the path forward would look like. They just knew a better world was possible, and worth fighting for.
We have to look back to look forward. When I’m feeling lost, I draw strength from those movements.
There's a fundamental difference between those movements Ferrell-Zabala cites as inspiration and the work that Moms Demand Action is doing. Each of those movements was about expanding rights, not restricting them. Simply put, Moms Demand Action is part of an anti-civil rights movement.
The historical roots of the gun control movement can be traced back to 18th and 19th century laws disarming freemen, African Americans, Native Americans, Catholics, and other disfavored groups and classes in American society. Those abhorrent laws are still cited by anti-gun attorneys general and judges across the country to defend modern-day gun control policies and practices.
I can understand why Zabala-Ferrell would want to distance herself and her organization from the earliest gun bans in U.S. history, so maybe she can take inspiration instead from the temperance movement, which is the real historical twin to the gun control lobby. That too was a movement that was fundamentally premised on the idea that the country would be better off if we restricted liberty; specifically, the freedom to drink.
The temperance movement started out advocating for just a few "common sense measures" like closing saloons on Sundays and not letting minors buy beer to take home to their parents (or to drink themselves). But when those measures failed to stem the social ills the movement blamed on alcohol, the temperance movement began advocating for an end to the sale and manufacture of intoxicating beverages altogether, and were ultimately so successful they managed to get Prohibition enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
At one point in time groups like the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Movement were the biggest groups of grassroots activists in the country. Wayne Wheeler, who headed up the ASL, wielded enormous power and influence; not only in Washington, D.C. but in statehouses across the country. He was admired by many politicians, but feared by many more. Ferrell-Zabala can only dream of being that successful.
Of course, the prohibition movement came to an ignominious end in the early 1930s. The Great Depression and the need to raise federal revenue through taxes on the sale of intoxicating beverages provided a handy excuse to repeal the 18th Amendment less than fifteen years after it was enacted, but by then the failures of Prohibition were evident for all to see. Prohibition turned minor criminals into overlords of illicit industries and sparked violent turf wars over illegal liquor markets, but it didn't do much to quench Americans' thirst for beer and spirits.
Ferrell-Zabala and Moms Demand Action aren't the ideological descendants of Ida Wells or Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi civil rights activist who said, "I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch, won't write his mama again." In fact, if Moms Demand Action had been around in the 1950s and 60s it would have been advocating for laws that would have made it illegal for Hamer to keep loaded shotguns at the ready in her bedroom. Instead, they would have demanded that Hamer keep those shotguns locked up in a safe with the ammunition stored separately, even if that gave her dynamite-wielding attackers the upper hand.
