Before she ran for U.S. Congress, Lucy McBath was a grieving mom. Now she’s one of Washington’s most relentless advocates for gun reform.
As Watts’s group gained prominence and considerable funding from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, McBath left the airline to work for Bloomberg’s umbrella organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, full-time. “Every conversation I had with her would end with me asking, ‘When are you going to run for public office?’ ” Watts recalls. “I’d been thinking state senate,” she adds with a laugh. “But then the shooting happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and we all realized she had to go bigger.
ON THE DAY I visit McBath in D.C., an anti–gun violence rally is taking place on the West Lawn of the Capitol. All the stars in the Democratic firmament are there—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Congressman John Lewis , Senator Dick Durbin. As McBath makes her way through the crowd, a preacher from Flatbush, Brooklyn, envelops her in a hug and asks for a selfie. Just a year earlier, she’d addressed a summit he’d helped organize on reducing gun violence.
Senator McConnell’s legislative counsel, Tiffany Ge, invites them into a conference room, and for the next 80 minutes, pain and frustration roll through the room like a cloud of thunder. A Chicago mother speaks about losing two of her children to random shootings; a survivor of the Las Vegas mass shooting describes the whoosh of a bullet passing through her hair; another survivor describes his dismay when his daughter was taught how to survive a shooting in kindergarten.
A few minutes after the meeting breaks up, McBath and I pass McConnell himself in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, a room with an 180-foot ceiling, a massive fresco, and sandstone floors—a room designed to remind you that government is big, individuals small.
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