http://www.latimes.com/wires/20010509/tCB00a4782.html

Wednesday, May 9, 2001
Global Gun Protest Hopes to Sign Up a Billion Moms

Reuters

    UNITED NATIONS--Anti-gun activists said on Wednesday they hope to sign up a billion mothers to help launch a global protest against gun violence.
     "We will march to protest the lives so heartlessly cut short and demand that world leaders and arms manufacturers and traffickers in death keep their weapons away from our children," protest organizers said in a statement posted on their Web site (www.billionmommarch.org).
     Their plans are to be unveiled at a news conference at U.N. headquarters on Thursday, timed to fall just before Mother's Day, which is observed on Sunday in the United States and Canada, said Elvi Ruottinen, one of the organizers.
     Although the worldwide protest is to be called the "Billion Mom March," it will not take the form of a single protest march, like the "Million Mom March" against gun violence which took place across the United States last Mother's Day, Ruottinen told Reuters.
     Instead, various protests will take place in different nations throughout the rest of the year, she said.
     Because of the success of the Million Mom March, "now they are getting a billion mothers on the job," she said.
     In a nod to the Internet era, one part of the protest will consist of a "Cybermarch" e-mail campaign aimed at opinion leaders like President Bush and first lady Laura Bush.
     As the first stage of the global campaign, mothers in the United States will be staging rallies at 33 state capitols on Mother's Day and afterward1 lobbying state and local legislators to enact "sensible" gun laws, organizers said.
     A major focus of the mothers' campaign will be a U.N. conference on small arms to be held in New York from July 9 to 20, aimed at cracking down on the global trade in light weapons, Ruottinen said.

Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times

I have to wonder just how many moms outside of the US would give a flying F***.

What a lot of American women don't realize, is there are a lot of places in the world, where the type of political activism taken for granted here, would seem absurd and misplaced to people just fighting to survive.