Bye, Shannon Watts. We're going to miss ya :: 01/10/2023

Over the years, Shannon Watts has done a lot. In her mind, she’s championed gun control and pushed for countless new regulations. She would argue she’d done untold good for the world.

In our mind, she’s been a clown who illustrates just how little she understood the guns she wanted to regulate.

Now, she’s announced she’s retiring from Moms Demand Action.

Shannon Watts, one of the country’s most influential gun-safety activists, says she will retire later this year from Moms Demand Action, the grass-roots advocacy group she began in her kitchen a decade ago and grew into a political juggernaut.

“I have asked myself, honestly, every year since I started this organization: Is it time for me to step back and let other people step forward?” Watts, 52, said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post to announce her decision. “And I think this is the right time.”

Watts’s success stems from an uncommon blend of qualities and experience that made her ideally suited for the job’s challenges. Her previous work as a communications executive gave her a deep understanding of how to attract media attention and market ideas. She turned a severe case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder into what she called a “superpower” that allowed her to hyperfocus for many hours straight, a skill she’s harnessed hundreds of times to live-tweet details and context after shootings

Watts says she won’t stop after resigning either, and though some around her have suggested she run for public office, the mother of five has yet to decide what will come next.

Really, this is a puff piece that seeks to do nothing but lionize Watts.

It doesn’t talk about any of the negative, such as how she strives to block pretty much every pro-gun voice on social media she thinks she can get away with. It doesn’t note that she’s freaked out over firearms that would survive just about any bit of gun control legislation she cares to say she supports and would only be restricted in a near-total gun ban.

So, with all of that, shouldn’t we be happy Watts is leaving?

I’m not.

For one thing, while Moms Demand Action likes to claim they’re effective, they tend to only get results in areas where anyone would manage to get results. Watts hasn’t really accomplished all that much with the organization she founded.

What if someone who can actually do something takes control next?

We’re already in a fight for the very life of the Second Amendment. The Bruen decision helped significantly, but whether that will be enough long-term or not remains to be seen.

Watts is a joke, but the person who takes over Moms Demand Action–either the next or the one after that–may not be.

Besides, Shannon Watts is comedy gold. She’s guaranteed to say something colossally stupid. One should always be so blessed as to have opposition as “gifted” as Watts.

Not that the Washington Post will acknowledge such a thing.

So yeah, I’m legitimately sorry to see her go. I hope wherever she lands next, we have an opportunity to hear more stupid from her that we can mock endlessly and I pray her replacements at the gun control group named like an adult film channel is just as mockable.

But I’m realistic enough not to hold my breath.

https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/01/10/shannon-watts-4-n65979