Mary Joyce said that when the Tennessee legislature held a special session following the March 2023 mass shooting at her daughter’s school, she had blind faith that her lawmakers would take action. She assumed many legislators would know some of the families whose children attended the private Christian school, The Covenant School in Nashville, or at least feel some kind of connection to them. If nothing else, the sheer tragedy would mean tangible change. 

She doesn’t feel that way today. 

Joyce and her fellow Covenant mom Melissa Alexander went to the statehouse five months later to advocate for gun safety measures as part of two new groups they co-founded, Covenant Families for Brighter Tomorrow, and a corresponding action fund to go along with it. They are lifelong Republicans — Alexander is also a gun owner herself — who could speak firsthand to the trauma inflicted by a mass shooting that killed three 9-year-old children and three adults. Though their children survived, they were traumatized in ways that continued to affect their daily lives; Joyce’s daughter also lost some of her hearing. 

But the politicians they encountered in the deeply red Tennessee statehouse had other things to say. 

While at the statehouse one day, Joyce recalls members of the Republican-majority legislature asking about the droves of protesters who had suddenly shown up to oppose a proposed law allowing school employees to carry guns on campus — and hearing a conservative lawmaker making comments about “all the hot moms of Nashville here in our legislature.” 

(The legislature ultimately passed that bill, making Tennessee the ninth state to legalize arming school employees.)

Comments about their gender didn’t end there. Joyce recalled hearing legislators say to some of the other moms she was at the statehouse with, “Wow, you’re really well-spoken for a female.” 

“It really diminished our value,” Joyce said. “Melissa and I are both business owners. We are active in our community and we’re connected and we’re smart and we’re not just silly little women that have no opinions or perspective on life.”

But, she adds, it only makes her and the other Covenant parents — mainly White women from conservative backgrounds — want to work harder. “No one’s going to talk to us like that. We make decisions about our children and our households and our businesses and our lives. It only gives us more fuel to keep going to raise our voice. When moms get their minds made up about something, there is no stopping us. You saw that happen with drunk driving. Well, we are here for gun safety and we’re not going anywhere.”

Moms have already played a critical role in the gun safety advocacy movement, from the Black women who founded Mothers of the Movement to speak out on behalf of their children killed by police and gun violence, to Moms Demand Action, founded by a White suburban mother who felt compelled to act in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. These groups followed the road map outlined during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s by groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving to organize and effect real change. 

Joyce said that as conservative women, they feel especially well-positioned to engage in this fight because of their culture, their community and their ability to relate to parents who may have felt excluded from the gun safety advocacy movement. 

“We are in this constant and evolving state of anxiety for mothers and kids,” she said, “because as the degrees of separation of gun violence get smaller, more and more people are just waiting for their turn, for it to be them next. That shifts the narrative from, ‘This is my freedom and my right to own a firearm’ to ‘Man, I am living in fear every day that I might be killed or that my child might be killed.’”

Joyce and Alexander are supporters of Second Amendment rights, but, as Joyce said, those rights need regulation. “Where do my rights end and someone else’s rights begin?” Joyce asked.

As part of a community of gun owners, the things they are advocating for — safe storage laws, red flag laws, universal background checks — feel in line with the values they’ve always held, they said. It’s why Alexander said she and so many other gun owners she has spoken to “very much disagree” with decisions like the Supreme Court’s June ruling that overturned the Trump-era policy banning bump stocks, devices that can be attached to a semi-automatic weapon to effectively turn it into a machine gun. (Civilians have been legally barred from owning machine guns in the United States since 1986.) “Responsible gun owners are not aligned with a decision like that,” she said.

Alexander points to polling done last year by researchers at Vanderbilt University who found that 75 percent of Tennesseans favor red flag laws that allow law enforcement officers to temporarily disarm people determined to be dangerous to themselves or others. “People want to see these things, especially responsible gun owners,” she said. 

Joyce believes that the Covenant moms have “created this safe space for mothers” who have found it hard to speak up because of how “politically charged” the issue of gun safety has become. 

A significant part of this work, she said, is educating women to think about policy over party. “I’ve been a lifelong Republican, but what does that really mean? How has the Republican Party changed? We have a huge following, especially with suburban mothers who probably didn’t show up for the primaries or vote in them, or if they did, just voted straight down party lines. What we’re saying is, ‘You need to know who it is you’re voting for. Pay attention to the person, not the party.’”

But they say that they have also sometimes hit roadblocks with other gun safety advocates because of their backgrounds. As conservative women, Alexander said, they’ve felt pushback from others who bristled at their political leanings and cultural norms, and weren’t sure if they should be in a space long dominated by progressives and frequently led by women of color. 

“We’ve heard feedback about, ‘You guys don’t look like us, you don’t sound like us, you’re different,’” Joyce said. “But maybe there’s power in that. Perhaps there are other people that maybe do feel the same way and look and sound like us — so let’s amplify this voice and come together. We all want the same goal.”

Still, Alexander said that they “love” and have been “embraced” by Everytown and Moms Demand Action, two of the largest gun safety advocacy groups who operate as one larger grassroots movement. “They’re setting a great example because they’re the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country, and I think they’re making an impact” because of their willingness to welcome a diverse group of advocates, she said. 

Alexander added that there’s not always a straightforward path to getting more women to understand the connection between public safety and how they vote. Because of her own background, she says, she is able to bring empathy to getting people to rethink their political identities. 

This includes encouraging people who may have sat out primary and even general elections to vote. “We have to show the importance of primaries, that they really do tend to determine the election. Typically, we only have a 20 percent turnout in Tennessee, so educating people to go and vote and do so in local primaries down to school-board level is key,” she said. “Local politics are what affect our lives.”

Joyce said she didn’t understand the degree to which Republican lawmakers are beholden to the gun lobby until after the Covenant shooting. Alexander added that her “biggest surprise” was seeing how the Tennessee legislature failed to pass a single piece of gun safety legislation in the nearly 18 months since that shooting. “I’m still shocked to this day how nothing has been done.” 

“We had to learn the power of elections, and that election cycle, we saw the impact it has on our politicians making decisions and what they will put their neck out for and what they won’t,” Joyce said. In the aftermath of the shooting, she and other parents lobbied for enhanced background checks, safe storage, and red flag laws. “It was frustrating because we would have what seemed like productive conversations and good conversations behind closed doors, and then when it came down to vote for legislation, they voted against it. All the gun safety bills were basically wiped off the table almost immediately.”

The politicization of what Alexander and Joyce see as common-sense parameters for responsible gun ownership make outreach to other conservative suburban women all the more critical — and difficult. 

Joyce said she’s also worried that the heightened political climate might scare many of these women off. 

“I’m nervous about this election, because when at the beginning of the special session called by our governor after the shooting at our school, we saw one day a crowd of Proud Boys. They are walking around with these huge weapons, just dripping in guns — because they can, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it,” Joyce said.

The presence of armed extremists can frighten women from wanting to join this movement, she said. “What we’re trying to do is bring people together and make people feel safe speaking out. But that’s just going to deter other moms and parents to be like, ‘Oh that scares me. I’m already terrified to send my kids to school. And that’s why I’m not confident or strong enough to open my mouth, because I don’t want to be a target by those guys.’”

Joyce and Alexander said they can empathize with these kinds of fears — but it was a privilege they lost the day their children survived a school shooting. 

“Nothing is scarier to me than what our children experienced, what my daughter saw, what she heard,” Joyce said. “She was shot at over and over and over again by a big weapon in her classroom. Glass was breaking everywhere, smoke filling up the room. She had trouble breathing. They had trouble seeing. Kids were crying. Her friends got hit by glass and were bleeding. Three of her friends were murdered in seconds outside of their classroom door. She lost hearing. She was terrified and confused. So I think about that image, and there is nothing scarier than that.”