Donna Dees is an activist for gun violence prevention and gun violence laws in the United States. She is the founder of Million Moms March, a group of almost a million moms who marched in Washington for stricter gun laws throughout the United States. On November 7th we met with Donna in our school for an interview. As our first interview it was very informative and we got tons of information and other contacts to extend our research. The goal of this fieldwork was to talk to someone who made a change themselves and had experience in raising awareness in our topic. Donna started the same way we did. She saw something that she thought needed to be changed and she began her mission to change it. She started by calling some moms she knew and informing them about her mission to enforce tighter gun laws. Soon enough, she had almost one million people in her march. And our beginning was very much the same place as her. Just making calls and contacting people to help us make any difference we can. So by talking to her about her experience, we learned a lot about the path ahead of us. Something I learned from this interview about gun violence prevention was that one of the reasons for tighter gun laws is to enforce background checks anytime a gun is purchased. This is to prevent mass shootings like the many we have seems recently. Most people that cause mass shootings are mentally ill, and without a background check we don’t know if someone who is mentally ill has possession of a gun.
This fieldwork had a huge impact for our group because we got much more starting information for our topic, we got dates for events that we might use as other fieldworks, and we got another contact for someone who focuses on urban violence, which is what we narrowed our topic down to. The next step for our group is to use the contacts and events Donna gave us and branch out towards them to use this interview as a launching pad for our group.
