Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
We’ve all become familiar with the gun control lobby’s group of red-shirted women demanding more infringements on our right to bear arms, but Moms Demand Action isn’t the only game in town when it comes to a female-centered movement dealing with gun ownership. Since 2016, the DC Project has been attracting a growing number of women who support the Second Amendment, and at this year’s SHOT Show, the group’s founder Dianna Mueller hosted a press event to help spread the word about the organization and its efforts around the country.
Mueller wants the organization to become a counter to Moms Demand Action, and one of the most visible ways the group is doing so is by adopting the color teal to serve as a visual sign of support for the Second Amendment, just as the red shirts of MDA are an easy way for lawmakers to see gun control activists in attendance at legislative hearings or in statehouse galleries. But Mueller and the other DC Project leaders aren’t just looking for ways to visually signal their pro-2A attitudes. They’re looking to have an impact on legislative policies around the nation. In fact, as Mueller told the audience at the DC Project presser on Tuesday, their goal is nothing less than to “save the country” through activism and education.
One of the things that’s most impressive about what the DC Project has been able to accomplish in just five years of existence is that the women have done this largely on their own. Sure, the group has some corporate and individual sponsors, but there’s no deep-pocketed billionaire bankrolling the organization as we’ve seen with Michael Bloomberg and Moms Demand Action. This is a true grassroots effort, and it’s so great to see how the organization has grown over the past five years.
In 2016, the DC Project’s first goal was to bring 50 women, one from every state, to Washington, D.C. to simply demonstrate to lawmakers that yes, pro-Second Amendment women weren’t mythical creatures. From there, the project has snowballed to the point that there are now more than 40 state-level directors for the DC Project leading the pushback against gun control legislation and pressing legislators to approve pro-2A bills, while DC Project members have been called to testify on Capitol Hill on an increasingly frequent basis.
Mueller pointed to the passage of Missouri’s Second Amendment Preservation Act, as well as the defeat of a bad bill in the Democrat-controlled legislature in Nevada last year as two examples of the state-level work that the DC Project is engaged in, and also discussed the legislative battles over multiple gun control bills that they’ll be engaged in this year in Washington State, where lawmakers are once again looking to ban so-called assault weapons and high capacity magazines while further eroding the state’s firearm preemption law and allowing localities and counties to impose their own restrictions on the right to carry during public meetings, permitted events, and in government-owned buildings.
The DC Project is still a pretty new endeavor, all things considered, but they’re already doing great work and have big plans for the immediate future. I’d encourage every woman who supports the Second Amendment to become a part of this organization and get involved in what the DC Project is doing. As their sign says, gun rights are women’s rights, and it’s critically important for more of us to be politically engaged if we want to see those rights safe and secure.