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• Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith Over Gun Violence: A Mother's Story - 2018 Atria, New York, NY

• Amazon -

  Lucia Kay McBath is the national spokesperson and faith and outreach leader for Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. McBath lobbies congressional and state legislators to enact sensible gun laws and supports political candidates for gun reform. The activist is now taking her work a step further and running for Congress in Georgia’s 6th District race. She is regularly interviewed on national television, sits on panels, and delivers keynotes.

• Huffington Post - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lucy-mcbath-kevin-abel-runoff-georgia-congress-democratic-primary_us_5b035fade4b0a046186f08a6

  05/23/2018 02:07 am ET
  Gun Reform Advocate Lucy McBath Heads To Runoff For Georgia House Seat
  McBath, whose son was shot dead in 2012, will be facing businessman Kevin Abel in a Democratic primary runoff on July 24.
  By Sarah Ruiz-Grossman and Dominique Mosbergen
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  Gun reform advocate Lucia “Lucy” McBath will face businessman Kevin Abel in a Democratic primary runoff in July.
  The top contenders in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District primary on Tuesday hope to unseat incumbent Republican Karen Handel in November’s general election.
  With 99 percent of precincts reporting, McBath amassed an unofficial tally of about 14,700 votes (about 36 percent of the total number) in Tuesday’s primary race, according to The New York Times. Abel had 12,400 votes (30.5 percent).
  McBath, a national spokeswoman for gun control group Moms Demand Action, was spurred into activism by the death of her son, Jordan Davis, a black 17-year-old who was shot dead in 2012 at a gas station in Florida by a white man complaining about loud music. In her first run for public office, McBath was initially planning to run for a state house seat, but she pivoted to a run for Congress after the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people ― most of them teens.
  “I knew that I could no longer sit on the sidelines,” McBath wrote on her campaign site, “while the politicians in the pocket of the gun manufacturing lobby decide the future of our gun laws.”
  If elected to Congress, McBath intends to push for “common sense gun violence prevention laws,” including background checks, raising the age for firearm purchases to 21 years old and fighting against “conceal carry” measures.
  McBath is not new to politics. As a child, she attended civil rights marches with her father, who was president of the Illinois chapter of the NAACP for over two decades. More recently, as a “Mother of the Movement” ― a group of women who’ve lost a child to gun violence or in police custody ― McBath has lobbied Congress, testified before Senate committees and campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Earlier this year, she helped plan the March for Our Lives protest.
  “This [campaign] has been my therapy,” McBath told Refinery29 in late February, of her run for Congress. “This has been the best therapy in the world for me because it makes me feel like Jordan didn’t die in vain, because we can change the culture that he died under.”
  The two-time breast cancer survivor is also committed to fighting for issues beyond gun control, like affordable health care and women’s access to health services.

  Abel is a co-founder of an IT consulting company and has served on the board of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. A native of South Africa who moved to the U.S. as a teenager, he is also running on a platform of sensible gun control and affordable health care. Reducing income inequality by “building an economy that works for everyone” is another priority Abel has identified.

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  “This is not the time to be timid or cautious, time to stand up and do something. This country has given me so much, I am honored to run, potentially serve and protect it for future generations,” Abel told Neighbor News Online last month about his political aspirations.

  The winner of the impending runoff will face a challenging race against Handel, who beat her Democratic opponent Jon Ossoff in last year’s special election ― the most expensive U.S. House race in history with more than $50 million spent on both bids.
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• Lucy for Congress website - https://lucyforcongress.com/about/

  Lucia “Lucy” McBath is a mother, wife, businesswoman and activist for social justice. After a 30-year career with Delta Air Lines, her second career has focused on reform that will make our communities safer and better for every American of every background.
  Lucy’s passion for public service was awakened by her family’s tragedy in 2012. She is the mother of Jordan Davis, who was shot and killed at a gas station in Jacksonville, Fla. that year by a man objecting to the music he was playing in his car. The shooter used Florida’s stand-your-ground law as his defense. He was not found guilty of murder in his first trial. In an October 2014 retrial, the shooter was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
  Losing her son in such a senseless way has fueled her lifelong commitment to community activism and the importance of political engagement. Early on, McBath’s sense of public service came from an extensive family background involving civil rights. Her father was the Illinois Branch president of the NAACP for over twenty years and served on its national board as well. As a child, she traveled with her family attending marches and rallies supporting the civil rights movement and the coalitions of organizations fighting alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Her mother was a registered nurse, often helping students completing coursework with tutoring and other support to further their healthcare careers.

  Before running for Congress, Lucy held dual roles as the national spokesperson for Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, as well as Faith and Outreach Leader for both. Her work included testifying in state capitols and speaking with lawmakers, activists, universities and community organizers across the county. In Washington, D.C. she has testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, lobbied members of Congress, and spoke at the White House Summit on Educational Excellence for African Americans. She served as a surrogate for the Hillary Clinton for President campaign in 2016 as one of the “Mothers of The Movement”. Here at home, McBath lobbies Georgia’s Congressional, State House and State Senate delegations to enact common sense gun violence prevention laws that save lives.
  Lucy’s work in her home community in Cobb County includes creating the “Champion in The Making Legacy Foundation” which provides charitable and educational assistance to graduating high school students attending traditional as well as technical and training colleges and universities – with two recipients attending Kennesaw State University. The foundation has expanded its program with its mentorship program which provides support and guidance in building life skills for the young men and women striving for academic success, with an incubator headquartered in Powder Springs. She serves as Lead Usher at Trinity Chapel (Seven Springs Church) and is an active member with Delta Sigma Theta Sorority’s Marietta / Roswell alumni chapter.
  McBath’s work has been recognized widely. She is honored to have been the recipient of the Chairman’s Award of the Georgia Democratic Party in 2017, “Mother of the Year 2016” by VH1 Television, voted as one of Refinery29’s 26 National Treasures, and an EMILY’s List Honoree. Her media appearances include Georgia Public Television, CNN, MSNBC, HLN, TV One and her son’s story has been featured in Jet, Rolling Stone, and Ebony and Essence magazines and in the documentaries “The Armor of Light” and “3 ½ Minutes: 10 Bullets.”
  Lucy was employed by Delta Airlines In-Flight Service for 30 years. She received her B.A. degree in political science from Virginia State University in 1982. Lucy is married, and these days, doesn’t have a lot of free time, but when she does she enjoys motorcycling, serving her church, and walking her beloved dogs.

• The Nation - https://www.thenation.com/article/stacey-abrams-lucy-mcbath-leading-charge-turn-georgia-blue/

  Stacey Abrams and Lucy McBath Are Leading the Charge to Turn Georgia Blue
  With two African-American women running in high-profile races, Georgia could become the next Virginia.
  By Joan WalshTwitter
  July 27, 2018
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  Democratic candidate for Georgia governor Stacey Abrams waves to supporters at an election-night party, May 22, 2018. (AP Photo / John Bazemore)

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  ast November, after Democrats surged in Virginia’s statewide races and won 15 seats from the GOP in the House of Commons, the competition for 2018 was on: Which state would become “the next Virginia”? Where else would a female-driven, multiracial coalition of voters and candidates face the extremism of Donald Trump and his enablers—and win?
  It’s looking like that state could be Georgia. In a Republican gubernatorial primary in which all the competitors went to great lengths to show off their racism, gun lunacy, and anti-immigrant bona fides, Secretary of State Brian Kemp defeated Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle on Tuesday. Worried about Kemp’s profile as a Mike Pence–style social conservative who could damage the state’s efforts to attract business, moderate Republican business leaders, along with sitting Governor Nathan Deal, backed Cagle. But Kemp, who branded himself as “the politically incorrect conservative” and ran to Cagle’s right, was endorsed by Trump. He’ll take on former state representative Stacey Abrams, the African-American leader who won her May primary with 76 percent of the vote.
  In Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, which saw the first stirrings of the 2017 resistance when newcomer Jon Ossoff almost won a seat that hadn’t gone to Democrats since the 1970s, Moms Demand Action champion and racial-justice crusader Lucy McBath won her runoff against South African immigrant businessman Kevin Abel. McBath will take on Representative Karen Handel, the scourge of pro-choice groups everywhere, in November. The mother of Jordan Davis, a black teenager who was murdered for playing his music too loud in Florida in 2012, McBath won support from gun-reform groups, along with Emily’s List and Planned Parenthood.
  Next door, in Georgia’s seventh, Emily’s List endorsee and Georgia State professor Carolyn Bourdeaux won her runoff against self-funded businessman David Kim. She’ll face GOP incumbent Rob Woodall in the general election. Although the Republicans are somewhat favored in both races—Handel less so—a blue wave could carry McBath and Bourdeaux into the House.
  McBath was not a shoo-in to win the runoff. She entered the primary late, and many progressives had already chosen between Abel and former television anchor Bobby Kaple, who courted local activist groups led in large part by mothers who had worked to elect Ossoff. When I talked to them in April, some of them were irritated that McBath had left a campaign for a State Assembly seat to go for Congress. But when she made it into a runoff with Abel, most progressives quickly coalesced behind her. Abel turned off many when he claimed in a debate that “in this 6th District, I am the best candidate to defeat Karen Handel and represent our demography.” The choice of the word “demography” rankled a lot of women, not just black women.
  “He better represents our district because he is a white man?” marveled activist Louise Palmer, who backed Kaple in the primary but swung to McBath in the runoff. “That made people come behind Lucy—the moms really swung behind her. We definitely want to flip this district, but not at the expense of our values.” The sixth is roughly 70 percent white—not exactly the vanilla suburban enclave it was when Newt Gingrich held the seat.
  Like Virginia, Georgia is a former Confederate state that is trending purple, thanks to the rise of voters of color, as well as Trump-loathing white suburban women. But when a multiracial blue tsunami swept a record number of women into the statehouse in Richmond last year—including an African American, two Latinas, two Asian Americans and a trans woman—it was a white man, Governor Ralph Northam, who topped the ticket. A similar coalition propelled Senator Doug Jones to his unlikely victory in Alabama. Can a similar Democratic wave sweep the nation’s first black woman governor to power in Georgia?
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  Adrianne Shropshire, head of the influential BlackPAC, says yes. “Look at how she [Abrams] won in the primary—she won all but six counties, and she won large margins in white counties. She won rural, suburban, urban voters, white voters,” against a white candidate, Stacey Evans. Shropshire’s group worked hard in both Virginia and Alabama and has made Georgia a high-priority state this year. She says Abrams’s overwhelming primary victory showed that Democrats “understand the historic nature of her candidacy.” Up against Kemp, “an opponent who is running on the culture wars, who is a nationalist,” Shropshire believes that Abrams can prevail because “people are rejecting that kind of talk, that kind of language.”
  “Stacey Abrams is the most talented candidate I can recall in Georgia, and Brian Kemp is running a phony MAGA campaign,” says Ossoff, who narrowly lost his special election to Handel last year. “It’s seen him well through a Republican primary, but I doubt it’s a message that he can count on in the suburbs.”
  Abrams’s candidacy has triggered a surge in Democratic participation. Democratic primary turnout jumped 57 percent from 2014, with 200,000 more Democrats voting. In all, 551,000 Democrats turned out in May versus 585,000 for Republicans in the July runoff. That GOP turnout was down from the last competitive Republican gubernatorial primary: Only 10 percent of Georgia Republicans turned out Tuesday versus 12 percent when Governor Nathan Deal ran against Handel in 2010—even though this year’s runoff had been nationalized by Trump’s endorsement of Kemp.
  That endorsement will cut both ways, galvanizing Trump supporters while repelling suburban moderates. Certainly Trump’s intervention spurred conservatives to come out for Kemp on Tuesday; although Cagle came in first in the May primary and was winning in almost every poll before the runoff, Kemp crushed him 70-30. But the Trump endorsement will also spur liberals to turn out for Abrams in November. Trump is particularly toxic in Atlanta’s sprawling suburbs, where moderate and independent women, some of them former Republicans, have been catalyzed into political activism since his victory.
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  Why Trump intervened on Kemp’s behalf is a mystery, since there’s little policy separating him from Cagle. The New Yorker notes that Kemp and Trump share the same cavalier attitude toward reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election. When Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson tried to shore up state election security, because of evidence of state-level Russian hacking attempts in the weeks before the 2016 election, Kemp rejected the help, calling it an effort to “subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.” Then, after a security researcher discovered shocking vulnerabilities in the state’s paperless electronic-voting system in 2017, the local Coalition for Good Governance sued Kemp for failing to insure a fair election in that Georgia sixth race, a suit that continues (four days after that suit was filed, all the records from that race disappeared). When special counsel Robert Mueller’s July 13 indictments of Russian officials included evidence they tried to hack county voting systems in Georgia, Common Cause and other groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the suit against Kemp. The secretary of state’s indifference to election security could make him a valuable Trump ally in 2020. “This is a real concern,” says Shropshire.
  And Kemp has more in common with Trump than just an indifference to election security. Earlier this month on Twitter a ProPublica reporter revealed that he watched the first Trump-Clinton post–Access Hollywood debate with Kemp at a Kansas hunting lodge, at a lobbyist-funded retreat, and Kemp joked that “Trump should have gone over there and groped her!” (That should irk Karen Handel, who played the moralist when interrogating FBI analyst Peter Strzok for his affair with a colleague. Sexual infidelity, she harrumphed, opens up a public official “to exploitation and even blackmail.”)

  Noting that Kemp “actually pointed a gun to the head of a teenager in an ad” (he was jokingly threatening a potential suitor for his daughter) barely six weeks after the Parkland massacre, Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts predicts that Abrams can mobilize a growing constituency for gun-safety laws, even here in Georgia. Gun advocates, of course, are betting against that.
  Gun politics also played a significant role in McBath’s runoff. Her opponent, Kevin Abel, frequently suggested that McBath’s association with Moms Demand Action and Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety, both of whom spent heavily on her behalf, would make it hard for her to beat Handel. It took him a day and a half to concede and endorse McBath, and then only in a bitter Facebook message in which he quoted the nonpartisan group NoLabels and denounced those who called him too moderate as “vile.” Obviously, a majority of the district’s Democrats disagreed with Abel’s characterizations. “Lucy is not anti-gun. She lives there in the South. She has volunteers who own guns, or they’re married to gun owners,” says Watts. As a two-time breast cancer survivor and a Planned Parenthood advocate, McBath was hardly the one-issue candidate Abel made her out to be, Watts notes.
  “Lucy is a formidable candidate who’s persevered through tragedy to become a powerful force for reform,” says Ossoff, who stayed neutral in the race but came out strongly for McBath when she won. “And this time, the GOP can’t put all its firepower in one congressional district,” as it did against him in 2017. “I am on cloud nine,” says Essence Johnson, an African-American local activist who is running to be a state representative within the sixth district, “to be on that ballot in November with two other women of color.”
  There are still signs that the massive surge behind the Ossoff campaign paid dividends in the sixth, where 11,000 more voters turned out for the runoff than in the neighboring seventh (the total was roughly 26,000 to 15,000). Still, that’s way down from the 2017 runoff, when almost 260,000 voters turned out, including 125,000 Democrats for Ossoff (an astonishing $50 million was spent turning out those 260,000 voters, most of it for Handel.) With the right operation, sufficient funding, and a blue wave, there are clearly a lot more Democrats for McBath to reach. In a district that still tilts Republican and with a $1 million war chest, Handel has the advantage, although The Cook Political Report lists the sixth only as “lean[ing] Republican.” That’s not great news for any GOP incumbent, who would normally expect to be running in a “likely” or “solid” Republican district.
  There are other signs Georgia is tiring of paranoia and racism: On Wednesday, GOP State Senator Jason Spencer resigned after he was outed as not just a racist but a fool by Sacha Baron Cohen on Who Is America. The show featured Cohen’s standard “Israeli terror fighter” Erran Morad instructing Spencer on how to fight off a Muslim terrorist, by screaming the N-word, doing a racist impression of a Chinese tourist, and literally showing his ass—dropping his pants to touch “Morad” with his bare behind. Many Georgia Republicans, including Deal, demanded that Spencer resign; Kemp stopped short of that, suggesting “he should issue a public apology.”
  This is certainly Abrams’s moment. She graces the cover of Time magazine, with a positive profile by writer Molly Ball. CNN wrote Thursday about “the Stacey Abrams primary“—the rush of 2020 contenders, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand—to stand beside the Georgia Democrat. In the primary, she won the endorsement of both Hillary Clinton, who she supported in 2016, as well as Bernie Sanders and his close ally Nina Turner. The “Democratic civil war” storyline that followed the New York primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (which is mostly fiction anyway) has thankfully passed over the Peach State.
  Still, Georgia Democrats recognize they’re fighting the historic dominance of Republicans to elect a historic governor. But Abrams has a formula for victory—making sure at least 40 percent of the November electorate is voters of color, while getting 25 to 30 percent of the white vote. In the May primary, black turnout was up 43 percent over 2010, while white turnout declined.
  Ossoff likes Abrams’s chances. “Stacey is working to reach every voter in Georgia,” he says, noting that the Republican Governors Association is spending money to defeat her. “The RGA does not want to be spending money here in July. That shows Georgia really is a battleground, and if anyone can do this, Stacey can.”

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  Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent, is the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.

• Huffington Post - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/moms-are-running-for-office-to-fight-gun-violence_us_5a95a154e4b096a77dba55a4

  QUOTED: "This [campaign] has been my therapy. ... This has been the best therapy in the world for me because it makes me feel like Jordan didn’t die in vain, because we can change the culture that he died under. Jordan’s death was the catalyst for me becoming the person that I have always been—but maybe I would never have taken a leap of faith if not for that."

  Moms Are Running For Office To Fight Gun Violence
  For these moms, it’s to protect children from gun violence.
  02/28/2018 11:14 am ET
  3.5k
  By: Natalie Gontcharova

  There are about a million reasons for women to run for office these days. For these moms, it’s to protect children from gun violence — an imperative that seems more pressing than ever in the current moment.

  Over 75,000 would-be volunteers have reached out to gun-violence prevention group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America in the week-plus since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 students and faculty were fatally gunned down.

  “Moms,” as its members call it for short, is already four million supporters strong. Moms volunteers aren’t always “volunteers” in the conventional sense. They attend advocacy days at their state capitols, work with local law enforcement, and work with businesses to encourage gun safety. Hundreds of them have also recently expressed interest in running for office in order to overturn National Rifle Association-forced legislation that allows guns in places like schools and college campuses.

  The group, which is the grassroots arm of Everytown For Gun Safety, funnels its volunteers into campaigns on the premise that political problem-solving requires many of the same skills as community organizing.

  “They get training just by being a volunteer — everything from fundraising to canvassing to messaging to doing interviews — you’re naturally creating this network around you because you have like-minded volunteers,” Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, told Refinery29. “It’s really encouraged women to get off the sidelines on a variety of issues. It’s going to energize the electorate and keep the focus on gun safety. And I think it will eventually flip Congress and our state houses, so it’ll be easier to pass good bills.”

  On Friday, Moms held another call for volunteers interested in running. It has a track record, already, too: Since its inception in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, Moms has had some major legislative wins, like getting background checks passed in eight states. Watts said that in November, 13 members of Moms Demand Action, from state reps to city council members, ran for office across the nation and nine won.

  As the raw, anger-filled post-Sandy Hook response shows, mothers undoubtedly experience school shootings in a particularly personal way. The moms we interviewed ahead are running for office because they want to make school shootings — and all mass shootings — a thing of the past. And they’re ready to win big.

  PHOTO: COURTESY OF JOE QUINT.
  Lucy McBath, District 37, Georgia

  McBath’s 17-year-old son Jordan Davis was gunned down in 2012 by a white man who was complaining about the rap music coming from the car Jordan and his friends were in. That’s when she knew she had to join the movement against gun violence.

  “This [campaign] has been my therapy,” said McBath, who is running for the Georgia House in a suburban Atlanta district. “This has been the best therapy in the world for me because it makes me feel like Jordan didn’t die in vain, because we can change the culture that he died under. Jordan’s death was the catalyst for me becoming the person that I have always been — but maybe I would never have taken a leap of faith if not for that.”

  If she is elected — and McBath, a 58-year-old two-time survivor of breast cancer, is the type of person who says, “I intend to win” with conviction — her main priority is to abolish Georgia’s concealed campus carry law, which makes it legal for licensed students over 21 to bring guns to certain parts of campus. If Jordan were still alive, she said, she would oppose him attending a college in Georgia because of it. Currently, 10 states including Georgia have provisions that allow people to carry concealed weapons on college campuses.

  “You spend all your life as a parent protecting and sheltering them, and then you’re sending them off to a college campus that has deliberately decided you can have firearms?!”

  McBath, from speaking with Black students about it, said she’s come to view carrying arms on campus as a point of privilege for certain white students. “You’re a walking target if you’re a young Black male...the gun gives them more empowerment, which puts students of color at a disadvantage.” She says she’s also spoken to Muslim families who are “scared to death” of campus carry, and have decided to send their kids to school out of state after it was passed.

  As the raw, anger-filled post-Sandy Hook response shows, mothers undoubtedly experience school shootings in a particularly personal way.
  In addition to Jordan’s death, two other things buoy McBath to run and win: her deep faith and her childhood in the civil rights movement. She grew up watching her father, then the president of the NAACP’s Illinois branch, edit the state’s civil rights newspaper.

  Watching her father work has informed her own activism. She reminisced:

  “I remember the volunteers coming to my house at night with their cocktails and cigarettes, strategizing... I remember holding my mom’s hand, walking down the street, signing spirituals... I remember one year during the Black Power movement, my father got us a black Christmas tree. My momma and I were like, ‘What is that?!’”

  Her dad responded: “Our Christmas tree is black because it represents who we are.”

  Amber Gustafson, District 19, Iowa

  Gustafson, a 41-year-old mother of three kids (14, 12 and 8) who is running for Iowa State Senate, was a Republican until 2008. She became a member of the Democratic Party in 2016, when she caucused for Hillary Clinton. Two things made her leave the GOP: guns and healthcare.

  While she grew up on a farm in a gun-owning family, she was never an NRA member and said the organization’s rhetoric didn’t line up with her beliefs. “They’re very hardline. And among my friends at the time, there was one way to talk about guns and no opportunity for thoughtful discussion. That frustrated me, because if kids are endangered we need to put every option on the table.”

  Like it did to many moms, the Sandy Hook massacre put Gustafson over the edge. At the time, she had two kids in school and her middle daughter was the same age as the kids who were murdered in the Newtown, CT, elementary school.

  She wanted to join the conversation as a person who knows what they’re talking about when it comes to guns. “Quite frankly, at the time, my opinion was, ‘These liberals don’t know anything about guns; they need me to get into the conversation so they don’t get anything wrong.’”

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  What she wanted liberals to know: “Gun owners are not the enemy. The vast majority support good, responsible gun legislation, but they’re afraid to speak out on it because of the clapback they get. Let’s reach out to gun owners as allies, not marginalize them, and acknowledge that the Constitution guarantees an inherent right to defend yourself.”

  Gustafson’s legislative priorities are mental healthcare funding and access — Iowa ranks among the bottom states in the nation for mental health treatment and has a higher than average suicide rate — making sure people with a history of domestic violence don’t have access to weapons, and curbing the types of gun regulations the NRA loves to dismantle.

  Right now, there’s a law making its way through the state legislature that would allow people to carry loaded guns in the carpool lanes of Iowa schools, where parents drop kids off and pick them up — even though the state currently prohibits guns on school grounds. Gustafson plans to take that on.

  When asked why legalizing guns in school carpool lanes is anybody’s legislative priority, Gustafson said: “It comes down to the issue of wanting to normalize openly carrying guns absolutely everywhere.”

  Nicole Clowney, District 86, Arkansas

  Just like for the other moms, for 35-year-old Clowney, who’s running for a House seat in Arkansas’ District 86, the fight is personal. She has two daughters: Evie, 7, and Kit, 3.

  “After the Florida shooting, that night, I was just lying in bed and staring at my ceiling for hours because I was thinking about my own daughter,” she said. “Those kids hid in the closet. I was thinking, My daughter’s classroom doesn’t have a closet. I’m getting choked up even talking about it... That will give me fuel for years.”

  It was a conversation with her daughter that inspired Clowney to run this past fall. “I was talking to Evie about my day. I said, ‘I met with our legislator.’ And she said, ‘So you met with a boy? That sounds to me like one of those all-boy jobs.’”

  Clowney realized that her daughter wasn’t completely wrong; after all, all of the legislators from their city of Fayetteville, AR, were men.

  “As soon as I heard that, I said, ‘Well, mommy’s going to do the job.’”

  Clowney’s grassroots campaign, supported by Moms Demand Action — she’s the founding leader of the Northwest Arkansas branch — started with a few friends in her living room and has grown from there. Most of the members had no political experience before volunteering for her. “We’re just regular people standing up for our kids.”

  Like McBath in Georgia, Clowney, who is a professor at the University of Arkansas, wants to take on the state’s new concealed campus carry law.

  In 2013, a bill was passed allowing guns on college campuses, but individual campuses were allowed to opt out at first. Subsequently, almost all of the over 30 campuses in the state opted out “because they know it’s a terrible idea,” Clowney said. But after many iterations, legislators forced through a bill in 2017 that ended the opt-out option. There are many worrisome parts in it, said Clowney, including that you don’t even need to keep a gun holstered. Guns are also now allowed not only on campuses, but in bars, churches, and many other public places in Arkansas.

  “Many responsible gun owners say this is a recipe for disaster,” Clowney said. Part of her goal is making people recognize that the vast majority of Americans support sensible gun policy (over 90% support universal background checks, including gun owners).

  “The more and more out-of-touch the NRA gets, the more extreme their message gets, the more gun owners look at them and say, ‘Oh, that’s not me, and they’re making me look bad.’ There’s a lot of that happening; there’s a lot of discomfort with the message.”

  Nancy de Pastino, District 91, Montana

  At the time of Sandy Hook, 42-year-old de Pastino’s daughter Sofia Eve, now 11, was in first grade. “That shooting absolutely broke my heart, but it also opened my eyes to the epidemic of gun violence in this country and the stranglehold the gun lobby has on our legislators,” she said.

  That’s how de Pastino, who also has an 8-year-old son named Zane, started the Montana chapter of Moms Demand Action, and consequently got to know the Montana legislature and gained alliances and friends who care about gun safety. Before running, she worked full-time for Moms Demand Action, managing the group’s work in 17 other states after founding the Montana chapter.

  She decided to run for office last year because “it was time for a seat at the table,” she said. She already had a number of legislative wins under her belt, including an expanded background check ordinance in Missoula, MT, in 2016.

  “A lot of running is getting the word out and talking to people about issues they care about, knocking on doors, making phone calls, holding events — that’s all stuff we do at Moms Demand Action,” she said. “I was very well-prepared.”

  Working on gun violence prevention in Montana for the past five years, her group has been successful in defeating “every bad bill” that has been brought in the past two legislative sessions — “and that’s like 10 bills,” she said. A lot of the work she’s done is keeping the laws that are already on the books and not letting them get dismantled.

  If she wins the seat, she said, she wants to help pass a bill that gets guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, as well as work on suicide prevention — a problem that plagues many rural areas. Montana has the second highest suicide rate in the country.

  Like the other candidates, she thinks it’s crucial to work with gun owners. “The conversation is so extreme and when you really have one-on-one conversations with people, you realize there’s so much more common ground than you give people credit for.”

  It’s with Republican support, she said, that Moms has kept guns away from college campuses, banks, offices, and more in Montana. Guns also aren’t allowed in K-12 schools in the state — “not that the gun lobby hasn’t tried that... But we have fought those bills super-hard.”

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QUOTED: "Her motivational viewpoints will surely provide fodder for inspired discussion."
"McBath's story is moving, poignant, and clearly written from the heart."
"a heartfelt call to action for advocates of common-sense gun laws."

McBath, Lucia Kay: STANDING OUR GROUND

Kirkus Reviews. (July 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
McBath, Lucia Kay STANDING OUR GROUND 37 Ink/Atria (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 8, 28 ISBN: 978-1-5011-8778-0
The mother of a son slain by gun violence advocates for tighter legislation.
In a horrific act of violence that garnered national media attention, social justice advocate and breast cancer survivor McBath lost her 17-year-old son Jordan Davis in a shooting at a Florida gas station. The murder occurred after licensed gun owner Michael Dunn felt that Davis and his friends were playing rap music too loudly in their car. Dunn used his home state's Stand Your Ground statute in an attempt to exonerate himself from any convictions, but he was charged with first-degree murder. The author painstakingly retraces the harrowing ordeal as well as her own history as a flight attendant, her first marriage, and the legacies of controversial groups like the National Rifle Association. She also openly shares her thoughts on prejudice and race relations in America, as applied to her son's incident, and what she believes to be a miraculous faith-based healing of her breast cancer. Her grief eventually led her into dedicated activism. Aided by her faith, McBath became an impassioned leader in the fight for stricter gun laws. As the national spokesperson and faith and outreach leader for Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the author believes shared stories and experiences collectively form the greatest collaborative tools against gun violence. Her motivational viewpoints will surely provide fodder for inspired discussion. While McBath's story is moving, poignant, and clearly written from the heart, secular readers may take issue with her stance on personal protection: She opines repeatedly that she believes "surrendering my personal safety not to guns, but to God, felt like the ultimate security." In this fervidly written narrative, the author discusses growing up with a father who was a licensed, gun-toting hunter, and while she is not opposed to the Second Amendment, she believes change is necessary to prevent further atrocities like that which befell her beloved son.
A heartfelt call to action for advocates of common-sense gun laws.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"McBath, Lucia Kay: STANDING OUR GROUND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546323366/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=134a2121. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A546323366

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-5011-8778-0
  Word count: 280

  QUOTED: "McBath tells a powerful story, and her grace, humility, and determined spirit will serve as inspiration to many."

  Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith Over Gun Violence; A Mother’s Story
  Lucia Kay McBath, with Rosemary Robotham. 37Ink, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-5011-8778-0

  McBath, a spokesperson for Everytown for Gun Safety, narrates the gut-wrenching story of her son’s 2012 murder and its aftermath. Jordan Davis, 17, was in the back seat of a friend’s car at a Jacksonville, Fla., convenience store when Michael Dunn, incensed by the boys’ loud music and their refusal to turn it down, fired 10 shots into the car, killing Jordan. Dunn, who is white, tried unsuccessfully to argue in court that he shot African-American Davis because he was “standing his ground,” a Florida law that gives “individuals who felt endangered the right to shoot and kill and ask questions later.” In 2014, Dunn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. McBath channeled her grief into activism: she served as the community outreach leader for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. She often writes of her faith, and how it emboldened her to forgive her son’s murderer (the Lord has asked me... to forgive his murderer”). McBath tells a powerful story, and her grace, humility, and determined spirit will serve as inspiration to many. (Aug.)
  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 07/16/2018
  Release date: 09/04/2018
  Ebook - 978-1-5011-8780-3
  Compact Disc - 978-1-5082-6579-5
  Downloadable Audio - 978-1-5082-6578-8
  Compact Disc - 978-1-5082-6580-1