Take Shannon Watts’ Advice and ‘Fight Like a Mother’ — against Her

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Gun-Safety Activist Shannon Watts on How to Fight Like a Mom and Beat the NRA,” a Wednesday Mother Jones headline reads. “Watts discusses her meteoric rise from stay-at-home mom to the NRA’s worst nightmare.”

They certainly pack a lot of presumptions into the opening statement for this overt PR piece and ad for Watts’ “Fight Like a Mother” book masked as an objective interview, but then again, we are talking Mother Jones.

A reader has to wander deep into the weeds to find that Watts had to go through a learning curve to realize that “gun safety” is better for manipulating people than admitting you want to control them, and that in addition to being a first-rate laundry-folder, Watts is also “an experienced communications professional.”

As for her “meteoric rise,” take a moment and prove something to yourself. Try to find the words “Bloomberg” or “Everytown” anywhere in the interview. And as for being “NRA’s worst nightmare,” I’d say if Mr. LaPierre is waking up in a cold sweat these nights, it’s not because Shannon Watts is haunting his mind.

But being a high-powered professional flack, Watts and the Mother Jones promoter lobbing her softballs know that presenting her as David to NRA’s Goliath casts her as the hero and them as the menacing giant villain. So it doesn’t hurt to throw their name out in the same paragraph she brings up “death threats,” although it would be interesting to see how many actually express credible intent (as opposed to the kind of stuff I get all the time) and are backed up by arrest reports.

Being the victim is an important part of the propaganda game Watts plays, so we also see where open carriers are portrayed as violent threats despite the fact that to do so with a firearm is a prosecutable crime everywhere and in Everytown, as it should be. Lost in the discussion is the real armed threat against gun owners, who must obey edicts Shannon & Co. succeed in getting enacted or face law enforcement repercussions.

There are people who are victims, at least that’s what multiple juries have said when they awarded multi-million dollar settlements for claims that the weed killer Roundup caused cancer in the plaintiffs. The claim is that the manufacturer “Monsanto hid cancer danger of weedkiller for decades.” And that overlaps with when Watts was heading up public relations efforts for the chemical giant and its new owner, Bayer:

Her LinkedIn profile documents “stay-at-home mom” Watts was Vice President of Corporate and Public Affairs Company for PR firm Fleishman-Hillard from 1998 to 2001, claiming she “Directed [a] seven-member team that identified and managed issues and crises for clients, including Monsanto Company [and] Bayer Corporation.” From 2001 to 2004 she assumed the position of Director, Global Public and Corporate Affairs Company for Monsanto, where Watts says she “Provided corporate communications strategy and support for Fortune 500 life sciences and agricultural company.”

Check that – sometime between my first and second report, Watts amended her profile to delete “Monsanto” from her Fleishman-Hillard VP entry.

“Juries don’t determine science and that some lawyers convinced a jury that this man deserves a payout has no bearing on the fact that science says Glyphosate does not cause cancer,” a comment poster to my second article pointed out. “In fact, it’s less toxic than table salt. Multiple independent studies have shown that fact, including a 30-year study of thousands of farmers and their families.”

That may be. I certainly can’t pretend to know the science. Then again, none of us have heard all of the evidence from all of the cases, either. But in this case, and I say this fully understanding the irony, the truth doesn’t matter, nor does it matter if we agree with the verdicts and awards or not.

The object here is to take Watts’ advice and “Fight Like a Mother,” and since when has reality mattered to them? Yet applying that formula has resulted in a formidable following that has become an existential threat to “legal” recognition of the right to keep and bear arms. And when you don’t want to fight but it is being forced on you, the object is to overcome the aggressor, meaning it’s fair to pick up and use “any chair in a bar fight.”

What matter is that Watts is a creature of the “progressives,” and they as a group are more likely to agree with the verdicts and want to know the extent of her involvement in trying to sway public opinion. While cognitive dissonance is a familiar state for “liberals,” it should trouble more than a few that their champion was once a top flack for a rich corporation that, according to due process-adjudicated outcomes, “gave cancer” to, among others, a black man who says “They have to pay for not being honest.”

Watts should explain what role she played as a top PR/corporate communications strategy executive in relation to the Roundup case. Are we seriously to believe she was unaware of it at the time or had no hand in formulating reputation management responses?

#PeopleDemandAnswers would be a more than appropriate message to advocate and press her on. When warranted, for “ourselves and our Posterity,” gun owners need to:

Fight Like a Mother.

About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.

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