Robert Draper & Shannon Watts on the NRA

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Just to go back to how you are building what I think you have all described as sort of the architecture and the infrastructure of change, you know, getting to the heart of politics of it since it was really tough at the top levels of Congress to meet the NRA head on. How have you done it? What was the sort of tipping point that turned you to more grassroots politics?

SHANNON WATTS, FOUNDER, “MOMS DEMAND ACTION”: Well, when I started “Moms Demand Action,” I really thought we would immediately pass federal legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook. The Manchin-Toomey Bill was the first to come up, which would have closed the background check loophole on every gun sale in America. It failed by just a handful of votes in the Senate. None of the Democratic senators who voted against that bill are still in office. When you have friends like the NRA, who needs enemies? And so, we realized that Congress wasn’t necessarily where this work would begin, it would be where it ended. And so, we immediately pivoted and started working in the statehouses and in board rooms and getting influencers to support us. Much like the marriage equality fight. And that is work that a while, it can take several election cycles and we are finally seeing the rewards of that. You know, we have hundreds of thousands of volunteers on the ground all across the country. We are not only the largest gun violence prevention organization, we’re one of the largest grassroots movements in the country. And finally, mostly women are organized around this issue in America and it is making a real difference.

AMANPOUR: Robert Draper, I see can you nodding your head in some of what Shannon is saying in terms of the architecture of this fight, you know, this counter fight against the NRA. Do you think the leadership, this sort of elderly aging leadership gets it, gets that there are a whole new demographic coming up that has different views about some aspects of gun ownership and gun usage in America?

ROBERT DRAPER, WRITER-AT-LARGE, NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: If they get it, they are not showing it. And I suspect they actually don’t get it. They realize there are problems, that they have created a monster, and then so doing it kind of painted themselves into a corner by saying over and over that people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are going to take your guns away from you and that our culture is dangerous than ever before and everybody needs to arm themselves, and defend themselves. Then, they have removed themselves from any table of compromise and resulted in them being extreme. Now, there’s something else I was — actually, what I was nodding my head about was that underlying the resistance to groups that, such as Shannon’s, has been the belief among the members of Congress that well, the most fearsome organization — lobbying organization in America is the NRA.

That certainly was true, but that was more true perceptually than it was in terms of their actual strength. No one knows how many people are actually in their organization. They appear to have, you know, a strong grassroots lobbying effort but it is not unassailably strong one. And in the meantime, now that we’re seeing these financial difficulties rise to the surface, it kind of begs the question, can they be that fearsome when they have so little money?