After losing her son to gun violence, Shaundelle Brooks knew she had to do something big.
Brooks’ son, Akilah DaSilva, was killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018 that left four dead and two wounded. His death launched Brooks into advocacy.
While still mourning, Brooks fought for gun reform at the Tennessee legislature. Testifying in front of lawmakers, she evoked DaSilva in her demands for more restrictive gun laws. “I realized quickly that I had lost my child, but didn’t want to lose any more children or see another mom go through what I’ve been through,” she said. “I learned to channel my grief into action.”
While Brooks felt empowered as an organizer, she also faced real challenges. Lawmakers shut down her proposals. Gun owners harassed her, claiming that if DaSilva had been carrying a gun, he would have been able to protect himself. Brooks would leave the statehouse in tears, heartbroken by the lack of accountability she witnessed. “I thought: ‘I have to do more than what I’m doing. I have to find ways to get through,’” Brooks said.
So in February, Brooks announced her bid for a seat in the Tennessee state House of Representatives. On 1 August, she’ll be vying in the Democratic primary.
Propelled by and fed up with what they see as a lack of progress when it comes to addressing America’s epidemic of gun violence, many activists like Brooks, who have felt the effects of gun violence first hand, are embracing a new tactic: running for elected office. For political organizers, this group represents a promising new cohort, whose members, if elected, may finally move the needle on gun reform.
“There is a new wave of activists-turned-candidates, particularly among women and mothers, who are no longer willing to stand by,” Brooks said. “How can we not think about our kids?”
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Pinpointing the moments that led them to run for office comes easily to these candidates.
For Emily Busch, who is running for a US congressional seat in Michigan, it was the November 2021 mass shooting at Oxford high school, where her son was a freshman, that propelled her to action. The event left four dead and seven injured. “My son ran for his life with 1,700 other kids,” Busch said. “It’s something that you never ever want to experience, which is why I’m running.”
At a school board meeting held shortly after, Busch was appalled that masking received more attention than gun safety. “It wasn’t until the third or fourth person got up to speak that they actually addressed that four children had just been murdered two weeks before,” she recalled.
Busch began organizing, urging neighbors and fellow parents to support gun reform legislation like universal background checks and safe storage requirements. She was then asked to run for state representative in a heavily Republican district in 2022 – but lost. Undeterred, her eyes are now set on Washington, as she readies for the Democratic primary on 6 August.
For those who have lost loved ones, championing gun reform has served as a way to carry grief.
Rhonda Hart, who is running in Texas’ 14th congressional district, “went full tilt into volunteer and activism” after her daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed. Vaughan was one of 10 people murdered in the 2018 Santa Fe high school shooting.
“You can sit here and be sad 24/7 and twiddle your thumbs, or, for me, I needed to get up and do something,” Hart said. So, in 2019, Hart began working on a bill in her daughter’s name that focused on preventative measures, such as safe storage and gun safety educational programs.
The US House passed the Kimberly Vaughan Firearm Safe Storage Act last session, but Hart, a disabled veteran, was surprised by the amount of resistance she faced along the way. Her own congressman, Republican Randy Weber – now her opponent – refused to support it, even after she and other advocates traveled to DC to meet with him after the 2022 Uvalde mass shooting. Weber has a record of supporting pro-gun legislation, including bills that would increase police presence at schools and allow gun owners to carry a firearm on school grounds.
An enraged Hart knew then and there that if she wanted effective legislation to be passed, she would have to do it herself. “If anybody has an axe to grind and a story to tell, it’s me,” Hart said. “We don’t want these people to go uncontested.”
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Brooks says gun violence survivors and their loved ones are in a unique position to convince others of the pressing need for reform.
“I think we’re going to be more passionate because we’ve experienced it,” she said, emphasizing the growing need for “leaders who understand this issue on a personal level and who can bring authentic, passionate advocacy to the legislative process”.
That same vision is driving progressive groups to find more candidates who are willing to run for office on gun violence platforms. Last February, nearly 50 new candidates gathered in Las Vegas with Demand a Seat, an initiative to train gun safety advocates to run for office and work on campaigns offered by advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety. At the four-day boot camp, participants received mentorship from veteran politicians, training in the fundamentals of campaign building and guidance in how to effectively elevate a gun safety platform.
The program capitalizes on a trend that gun safety advocates have been witnessing for several years. “Gun safety is actually good politics now, it’s not just good policy,” said Moms Demand Action’s executive director, Angela Ferrell-Zabala. “Folks [are] choosing to run and win on gun safety.”
Since 2021, more than 250 volunteers from Everytown alone have been elected into office, and the organization has a 58%-win rate, said Ferrell-Zabala. And while a decade ago, half of congressional Democrats had A-ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA), today, that number is zero. Down-ballot races are especially important to this electoral strategy, with almost 95% of the program’s volunteers-turned-candidates running in state and local elections.
Participants in the program – and gun reform candidates more broadly – share more than their experiences as gun safety advocates and gun violence survivors. They are also connected by gender and parenthood: the cohort is “overwhelmingly” made up of women and mothers, explained Ferrell-Zabala. “We intentionally aim to empower people who may never have thought they could run for office, like women and mothers – especially Black and brown survivors of gun violence,” she said.
Members of the so-called “mass shooting generation” themselves are also entering races, taking inspiration from young progressives who won seats during the 2022 midterms. Most notable is Florida’s Maxwell Frost, the first member of gen Z to be elected to US Congress after serving as national organizing director for March for Our Lives, the gun control advocacy group founded after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
Earlier this year, 19-year-old Navian Scarlett, a vocal gun safety organizer just two years out of high school, ran for school board in Frederick county, Maryland. While she lost her bid in April, Scarlett’s candidacy offered insight into how violence prevention policy is felt by youth on the ground.
As an adolescent, she felt the ripples of gun violence on numerous occasions: first when members of her high school basketball team were shot and wounded on campus, and again when shots rang out at a prom after-party that her brother attended. Days after that party, her school ran an active shooter drill that she says traumatized the student body. “I witnessed students having breakdowns. Some of them were curled up with their knees to their chests rocking back and forth and crying,” she said. “It wasn’t as effective for students as [school leaders] may have thought.”
For her, that disconnect speaks to the importance of having youth voices in the movement.
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In Nashville, Brooks says that when the the race catches up with her, she remembers why she is running in the first place.
She’s proposing expanding background checks, striking down laws that allow gun owners carry without permits and elevating red flag laws, something she said could have saved her son. “Akilah could have been here,” she said, explaining that the man who killed him had a mental illness and had previously had his gun taken away.
“The journey has been transformative. It has shown me that from immense loss can come a powerful drive to create a better world.”
