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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

A child shoots a child
It isn't about guns; it's about neglect.
By Beth Broeker
[03/13/00]

My brother's keeper
I have saved him all my life, but now there are too many miles between me and the paraded condoms, the muffled awe.
By Chris Colin
[03/10/00]

"Terminus"
A harrowing poem about rape and murder in the Balkans.
By Nicholas Christopher
[03/09/00]

Witness for the persecution
Croatian novelist and journalist Slavenka Drakulic tells a story of breathtaking brutality. We interview her about her new novel and her experiences.
By Kate Moses
[03/09/00]

Abortions in TV land
Good girls don't get them; bad girls do and pay a price.
By Audrey Fisch
[03/08/00]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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Organ donation, for example, is a brilliant idea. A person who, tragically, no longer needs an organ, gives it to someone who would otherwise die without it: Brilliant.

Or City Harvest, the New York program that picks up excess food from hotels and restaurants where it would otherwise be thrown away and delivers it to soup kitchens and shelters, thus enabling the city's poor to share in the culinary riches the wealthy enjoy daily: Brilliant.

Also Today A child shoots a child It isn't about guns; it's about neglect. By Beth Broeker   When liberals lie about guns Zealots are polarizing the debate over how to stop violent crime -- and whether firearms can help. By Cathy Young

So last fall, when I first read about the Million Mom March, a Mother's Day demonstration in Washington to protest the vast number of guns in our culture and the ease with which they can be procured, I thought ... well, first I thought: "Why didn't I think of that?" Then I thought: Brilliant.

The person whose idea it was is Donna Dees-Thomases, a New Jersey mother and a part-time publicist for David Letterman. Dees-Thomases' children attend preschool at a Jewish community center -- a preschool not unlike the one in Granada, Calif., where, last August, a white supremacist decided to "send a message" by shooting at kids.

A week after the JCC shooting, Dees-Thomases applied for a permit to march on the Washington Mall. Then she started calling her friends. Says Dees-Thomases: "It was my idea for about five minutes."

The Million Mom March was launched with a press conference on -- symbolically enough -- Labor Day. In keeping with the pregnancy theme, the 25 mothers at the press conference challenged Congress to use the nine months before Mother's Day to enact what they call "common-sense" gun legislation.

Personally, I would love to see every gun on the planet disappear. But the Million Mom platform isn't calling for an outright ban on handguns. This march is about the no-brainer stuff: equipping all handguns with safety locks and childproofing devices; licensing and registering each handgun; requiring background checks and cooling-off periods before the purchase of a handgun; and limiting handgun purchases to one per month per person. It is hard to believe that responsible gun owners would want anything less.

In nine months, Dees-Thomases announced at the press conference, thousands of mothers would march on Washington, either in celebration of such laws having been passed, or -- in the more likely event of Congress' continued inactivity on this issue -- to reiterate the demand for them.

It's hard to imagine a barrage of objections to Dees-Thomases' proposals. Aren't we sick of it already? Haven't we had enough of the carnage caused by guns? Ten-year-olds sharpshooting their classmates? Surly adolescents opening fire in the lunchroom? The "disgruntled former employee" looking to go out in a blaze of glory? A 6-year-old looking to settle a score on the playground?

And what about the more than 4,000 children who die in gun-related accidents each year? That's 11 kids a day. And we're not talking about crimes, or intentional shootings. We're talking -- or not talking enough -- about accidents.

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