Million Mom March Expected to Draw 150,000 Nationwide

Bent on breaking the congressional deadlock over gun legislation, a newly aroused lobbying force converges today on the nation’s capital and dozens of other cities nationwide: fed-up moms.

Their numbers may not live up to the name organizers gave the event--the Million Mom March--but 150,000 or more demonstrators are expected to gather this Mother’s Day for the largest gun control rally in U.S. history.

“We are moms bonded together, mad and determined,” said Debbye Kelley-Watson, a march organizer from Washington, D.C. whose 19-year-old son, Daryl, was shot to death three years ago. “And when moms get together mad and determined--everybody watch out.”

Gun control rallies are planned in about 70 communities across the country, from Kokomo, Ind., to Austin, Texas, to Watsonville, Calif. So are rallies sponsored by the Second Amendment Sisters, who support gun ownership.

Organizers say the march is only the beginning of a drive to overcome the fund-raising and political organizing machinery of the 3.4-million-member National Rifle Assn. The NRA is the most prominent organization in a gun rights coalition that has shut down proposed new gun controls in Congress in the year since the fatal shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado moved the issue to the political front lines.

But challenging the NRA will take more than a one-day show of strength. Gun control advocates hope to build on the organization of the march--the computerized lists of marchers, the volunteer network of organizers and the new recruits who are moved by Sunday’s event--to launch fund-raising campaigns and recruit foot soldiers for get-out-the-vote drives.

“Our goal is to do as much as we can to bring these people into the political process,” said Joe Sudbay, political director of Handgun Control Inc. “The NRA has always been perceived as having two strengths: They have a boatload of money, and they have had a committed grass roots.

“We have a much larger percentage of the population on our side. Now we’re starting to get them to be very committed in making guns a top priority voting issue, and we’re also going to have a lot more money to spend politically than we ever have. We’re starting to meet them on their own ground.”

The moms are pushing for a national system to license handgun owners and register their weapons, among other controls.

A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the gender gap on gun control is widening. Among 1,303 adults polled May 2-6, 57% supported gun restrictions while 38% backed the rights of gun owners.

Men supported gun owners’ rights over gun control 49% to 46%. Of men older than 50, 55% favored gun owners’ rights, up from 37% just two months ago, according to the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Women of all age groups supported gun control 67% to 28%.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said he believes that the change in the polls reflects a backlash among white men. “Men have begun to be defensive.” They believe in gun control, Kohut added, but they don’t want it to go too far.

The march, which is really a rally on the National Mall, will get underway with President Clinton holding a send-off at the White House for about 1,000 moms. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is running for the U.S. Senate from New York, will be among the marchers.

On Saturday, Clinton said the message of the march reaches beyond mothers.

“They’re saying gun violence touches us all, wherever we live, whatever the color of our skin, whether or not we have children,” the president said in his weekly radio address. “They remind us that the loss of a child is a loss for us all. And they know we have the power to do something about it.”

Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. (R-Okla.) responded that the Clinton administration had failed to prosecute illegal gun use--an argument that the NRA has hammered in recent months in an attempt to retake the political offensive.

“Law-abiding gun owners aren’t hurting our children; criminals are,” said Watts, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. “Let’s focus on the criminals.”

But the spotlight today will be on the moms, in particular mothers whose children’s lives were shattered by bullets.

Donna Dees-Thomases, the New Jersey mother who founded the march, has portrayed the event as nonpartisan, keeping all but a few politicians off the stage. “This is about real moms, real people out there, and we’re going to do it,” she said in an appearance with event organizers in downtown Washington on Saturday.

Two politicians with authentic experience as victims of gun violence are scheduled to speak: Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), whose husband was killed and son injured by a gunman on a Long Island commuter train in 1993, and Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a Democrat and daughter of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the presidential candidate who was felled by an assassin in Los Angeles in 1968.

With talk show host Rosie O’Donnell leading the ceremonies, the rally is attracting a fair number of celebrities. But many participants will be men and women who have never taken part in demonstrations before.

They have come from places that have become well known because of gun violence--Dunblane, Scotland; Littleton, Colo.; Mount Morris Township, Mich.; and Granada Hills.

And they include moms like the march’s Maryland coordinator, Carole Price, whose 13-year-old son, Johnboy, was shot to death in 1998 by a 9-year-old neighbor who got a 9-millimeter Ruger from a dresser drawer.

It was the shooting rampage last August at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills that inspired Dees-Thomases to begin organizing mothers. Parents of children who attended the Jewish day-care center are among those attending the march.

Organizers of the march had raised about $1.8 million through last week, including $1 million from an anonymous New York donor and $500,000 from the Funders Collaborative for Gun Violence Prevention, set up by billionaire George Soros, philanthropist Irene Diamond and an anonymous donor, said Andrew McGuire, executive director of the San Francisco-based Bell Campaign, a victim-led gun control group helping with the march. The budget for all of the rallies around the country is $2.3 million.

Once the march is over, gun control advocates plan to survey candidates for public office, from city council to president, on their views on tougher gun laws, McGuire said.

While the factors that underlie the gun control stalemate are complex, cutting across regional and partisan lines, the marchers have a simple message. “We hope to get Congress to enact legislation, of course,” said one coordinator, Claudette Perry, 47, of Washington, whose godson was slain by gunfire in 1998. She told a reporter: “This is what we want, and we’re going to push until we get it. We’ll leave all the politics up to you guys.”