Why giffords got shot

The last big step in the Giffords Courage plan is set to play out on November 3. COVID knocked Gabby off the trail, and it threatens to squeeze every other issue out of the conversation. But the seeds Gabby planted are bearing fruit. Last fall, Joe Biden announced a sweeping agenda on guns that would have been ridiculed as political suicide 13 months earlier. Among its three dozen initiatives are bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, new regulations on those already in circulation, and a voluntary buy-back program.

It limits gun purchases to one a month, incentivizes states to pass red-flag and gun-licensing laws, moves toward biometric requirements on all future guns, and repeals a law protecting gun manufacturers that Biden himself helped pass 15 years ago. It also highlights community-based programs to reduce urban violence—which draw scant media attention, despite overwhelming data demonstrating their effectiveness. But the Giffords Courage goal is even more audacious. Gabrielle Giffords was born June 8, , just outside Tucson, on the edge of the vast, unforgiving Sonoran Desert.

She grew up on horseback, inseparable from Buckstretcher, her trusty Appaloosa. She dressed in leather jackets and Doc Martens and had an angelic smile and tousled chestnut hair that looked far too luxurious for a second grader mucking out the manure at Bel Air Stables. She competed in hunter-jumper competitions, prodding half-ton stallions to leap solid barriers. Gabby tried to bring her horse to Cornell, then took up racing motorcycles.

When she ran for Congress, she would tell audiences her political training began at age eight, when she first learned to shovel horse shit. Gabby was born with an insatiable curiosity about what made people tick. In grade school, she volunteered to teach in a Spanish-English exchange program.

She spent a semester in Spain in high school, and later a year in Chihuahua, Mexico, as a Fulbright Scholar. No one was surprised when she married an astronaut. When she started dating Mark Kelly, he had already witnessed an earthrise.

He had piloted the space shuttle Endeavour , and would later pilot and then command missions on Discovery. She married Kelly in a borrowed Vera Wang dress, on a working Arizona farm. The reception featured freshly made tortillas, a mariachi band, and a military saber arch.

She said reading a tire taught her how to read legislation later: Identify the weak spots. In Tucson, Gabby surrounded herself with a colorful menagerie of friends. Brad Holland looks like a young Dr. John, with his three-inch goatee and gold hoop earrings.

His friends call it Bradlandia. It beat anything Gabby had encountered in Greenwich Village, and she moved in. Eventually Gabby sold the company to Goodyear and turned her attention from studying people to trying to help them. She was elected to the Arizona House and then, at 32, became the youngest woman to serve in the state senate. She had her eye on Congress, but she was still too young and green. Worse, she was a Democrat in a district that was reliably red.

But then, in , he did. The leap felt premature, but openings like that are rare, so she jumped in. She beat a prominent TV newscaster for the nomination and then trounced a conservative immigration hawk by 12 points in the general. She ran and legislated as a moderate, pro-business Democrat and rarely mentioned guns. She respected the Second Amendment and enjoyed exercising it. She has long kept a Glock in a safe at her house in Tucson, where the walls are hung with paintings of cowgirls and cowboys on horseback.

Joe Biden worked closely with the Giffords Courage team on his gun-safety agenda. Biden has embraced most of the measures spelled out in the MFOL Peace Plan, including urban-violence intervention programs, which were a big focus of the Vegas forum. Mass shootings are horrific but account for a minute fraction of the carnage. Two thirds of gun deaths are suicides. The vast majority of the remainder are urban homicides.

Black men account for 6 percent of the U. Black Americans are 10 times more likely than whites to be killed with a gun. Most gun suicides are impulsive acts, so anything that blocks instantaneous access to a weapon helps, including waiting periods, biometric safety locks, red-flag laws, and mental-health restrictions on permits.

The key to slashing urban homicides is breaking the cycle of violence. Once gunfire erupts, it tends to cycle up quickly, with escalating rounds of payback. But community-based teams have discovered a prime venue for staging interruptions: the emergency room. There is a brief window after a shooting to mediate a solution between rival gangs, who typically want to avoid going to war. It is also the moment the wounded young man is most inclined to rethink his relationship with gun violence.

Hospital-based violence intervention, as the strategy is known, has proven wildly successful. Programs in several states have slashed homicides by as much as 60 percent. It attributed some of the spike in urban gun violence between and to a reaction to police violence and growing distrust of law enforcement.

David Kennedy puts it more bluntly. He is director of the National Network for Safe Communities, whose research was cited throughout the report. Hospital interventions pull cops out of the equation, shifting that role to people like pastors, social service workers, and neighborhood moms.

The only obstacle is funding. I met Gabby backstage for the first time in Las Vegas, minutes before she opened the forum. Her fragmented speech was the second thing I noticed. The first was the way she uses eye contact. Once she locked in, it was hard to look away. She laughs frequently, with her whole body, shoulders swooping forward, blond curls bouncing. Gabby is relentlessly curious and not shy about drawing conclusions. Small talk collapses to intimacy on first contact. His look was impeccable, almost, but Gabby reached in to tweak a stray lock of his salt-and-pepper hair.

He blushed like a schoolboy, and his chin dipped. Gay , I was tempted to say. Body issues. She was going to get it out of me, and by our next meeting, she did. Listening is a skill, but eliciting is an art form. Her speeches connected because of the curiosity that informed them. Smith served with Gabby on the Armed Services Committee, and as chairman of the terrorism subcommittee he oversaw congressional delegations to some of the nastiest spots on the planet. A bunch of old men gawking at lasers, explosives, and Star Wars toys—and angling for contracts to manufacture them in their home districts.

Some of the questions she was asking were—truthfully, they were very feminine, and thus welcome. How are you living? Three days later, her new life would begin. It was 50 degrees when Gabby pulled up at a. Capitol building on Wednesday had former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords worried for her husband's safety and reflecting on her own encounter with political violence that nearly took her life 10 years ago.

Giffords, who was shot in the head in an assassination attempt in , thought back to that time as she waited to hear if her husband, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, was protected during the assault on the Capitol building. The riot left four people dead and forced Congress to evacuate. I love you, sweetie. She has limited use of her right arm and leg; she walks with a limp and uses a cane. Her memory is sharp and her humor intact, but she struggles to speak.

For her videotaped remarks to the Democratic National Convention in August, which lasted about 90 seconds, she practiced and trained with her speech therapist for hours, Ambler estimated.

That said, her use of language this week was more fluent than it had been during a USA TODAY interview with her in , although she still typically responds to a question with just a word or two. Now 50, she seemed more confident and relaxed. She easily recalled the name of a Tucson restaurant she had taken the reporter to more than six years earlier — it was Pizzeria Bianco — and lamented the fact that it has since closed.

Lot of Zoom. She has been taking a virtual yoga class twice a week as well as French horn lessons and Spanish lessons. She rides her recumbent bike whenever she can. Really cold! Oh, chilly. Giffords' willingness to let people see her struggle is one reason she has been so effective as an advocate, said Patricia Maisch, a constituent who had signed up to speak with her that day 10 years ago.

She had grabbed the assailant's extra ammunition to keep him from reloading his gun. After the shooting, the trauma surgeon who treated Giffords and other victims at the University of Arizona medical center that day decided to run for office. Some said they wanted to make sure the losses of would count for something.

Kelly spoke directly to Loughner. Facebook Twitter Email. FBI releases new photos, video of Giffords shooting. Josh Susong The Republic azcentral. Tucson memorial dedication on anniversary of Tucson mass shooting. Former U.