The Mom Behind a Movement

Spangler said she is sometimes startled by how much her life has changed in a year.

It all started from raw passion, she said. "The Virginia Tech massacre was on Monday. I was just doing the normal preschool mom thing -- going to the sandlot, pushing the kids on the swings. But I couldn't stop thinking how tragic it was," she said. Every time she looked at her two children and put herself in the place of a parent whose child had died that day, she couldn't bear it, she said. "On Tuesday night, I just remember bursting out in tears."

She had been watching a movie -- she can't remember which, but the message was about fighting back. She decided she would do something but had no idea what. On Wednesday, taking a walk along the Potomac River, the idea of a lie-in came to her. "It was instinctive, just BANG, I'm going to get 32 friends to lie down with me," she said. "As a mother, I was outraged for my fellow Virginians."

She said she had no idea how to stage a protest, so she just started e-mailing friends, neighbors and other moms. Within six days of the shooting, she had organized her first lie-in in front of City Hall in Alexandria. She and her friends were draped in maroon and orange ribbons, Virginia Tech's colors.

After that, people asked her what came next. "I said I didn't know. I was exhausted," she said. "But then I thought I could try to make this into something. What was the worst thing that could happen? It wouldn't take off? That I'd embarrass myself? I'd found out that 80 percent of people in most polls want to have tighter gun laws -- we just had to find a way to mobilize them."

Spangler found a host of volunteers willing to create and run the Web site and print the posters. And, as the president of the family-run C.D. Spangler Foundation, a philanthropic group that reported about $447 million in assets in 2006, Spangler has the ability to bankroll the movement. She won't ever raise money for it, she said. The movement is all about the people's will.

And if anyone would know how to tap into the grass roots, it's Spangler. She spent years studying social movements for her political science doctorate at Columbia University. Her dissertation, "The Politics of Disease: Social Movement Responses to AIDS, Breast Cancer and Prostate Cancer in the United States," is a look at three movements that successfully changed policies, boosted funding and research and saved lives. The key to each was that they were led by the people, she said. They were fueled by outrage and passion at the grass-roots level. They used creativity and repeated their messages until things changed.

"The message from these social movements is this: People rising up together to have their collective voice heard can make change," she said.

Critics in the gun rights community beg to differ.

"I'm familiar with her lie-ins. I don't see the purpose of it," said Philip Van Cleave, who heads the Virginia Citizens Defense League. "It doesn't seem to be effective in changing anything, as far as I can tell."

"When you consider that we had just had the Virginia Tech massacre just that prior year, the fact that the gun show law didn't change basically shows that the right to keep and bear arms is strong in Virginia. Because even with all the lie-ins and the emotions involved and groups like Abby Spangler's efforts to make hay out of it, the Virginia Assembly looked at it and decided there is no loophole. And nothing changed."

In fact, Van Cleave said, for the first time, both the House and Senate passed legislation this year that would have allowed those with concealed weapons permits to carry loaded guns into restaurants that serve alcohol. (Current law allows people to openly carry a loaded gun into such places, but not concealed.) Both houses also passed legislation that would have permitted someone to transport a loaded gun in a locked container without a permit. Kaine vetoed both bills.