Less than a decade after surviving a mass shooting, Gabby Giffords is a leading light for gun reform across the country—and she’s not backing down
Gabby Giffords smiles as her iPad chimes. Sentence formed. Way too easy. The smile is magnetic, if slightly crooked: Her dimples burrow a little deeper on the left side. Her left eyebrow is more expressive, while the right looks permanently arched.
She raises her left hand, the good one, palm forward, smashing it against some invisible barrier. Her jaw clenched, she’s locked in a wrestling match with herself. But the Broca can’t be bullied. Her hand drops, shoulders sag. She turns to her therapist. On November 6, 2018, the impossible happened. Hundreds of candidates for Congress ran on guns. In some key battleground House districts, candidates from both parties supported gun safety. The Democrats flipped the House, and 40 incumbents Giffords Courage had targeted on guns were ejected. Of course there were other factors, but for the first time in decades, exit polls indicated guns as a major issue, with most people votinggun safety.
Gabby and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, preparing breakfast together in their home in Tucson, July 2020.Gabrielle Giffords was born June 8, 1970, 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 landed a fast-track consulting job for Price Waterhouse in Manhattan, but in 1996 she drove her Ford F-150 pickup back to Tucson to take over the family business, a chain of 11 discount tire stores called El Campo Tire & Service Centers. She’d pitch in changing tires and see how brutal the searing Tucson pavement was on tread. She said reading a tire taught her how to read legislation later: Identify the weak spots.
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. After Parkland, the MFOL kids partnered with Chicago’s young Peace Warriors, who call themselves “violence interrupters.
Biden’s plan, the most ambitious of any primary candidate, calls for an unprecedented $900 million, eight-year initiative to expand these programs into the 40 cities with the worst homicide problems. Representative Adam Smith says listening was always the source of Gabby’s power. 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. Most members avoided these “CoDels” at all costs, but “Gabby was relentless about going,” Smith says. “She was the one who organized most of them.
Gabby was dressed smartly: a simple red blazer and red beaded necklace over a black blouse and skirt. She wore light makeup and didn’t fuss too much with her hair, which was a bit unruly that day. As usual, she’d drawn an eclectic crowd. This morning, it included a federal judge, a retired Army colonel named Bill Badger, and a nine-year-old girl named Christina Taylor-Green, eager to learn about politics from the most successful woman in the state.
The Glock’s extended magazine gave the perp up to 33 rounds before he needed to reload. Extended magazines had been outlawed by the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, but Republicans in Congress blocked the law’s reauthorization in 2004. Seven years later, Gabby’s assassin purchased one at the local Walmart.
The man complied. He held his foot over the Glock, and the others subdued the gunman until police arrived.Gabby’s prognosis was bleak. Doctors induced a coma, unsure if she would ever come out. Six days out, her husband, Mark Kelly, sat vigil beside her bed with Pelosi and two of her best friends in Congress, Gillibrand and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Doctors removed almost half of Gabby’s skull to relieve the pressure from fluid leaking, a major cause of brain damage. They kept the large bone fragments alive so they could re-implant them, only to wind up using synthetic bone for her reconstructive surgery. Gabby asked to keep the skull fragments as a memento of where she’s been. They’re still in the back of her freezer in a Tupperware container, surrounded by leftovers.
It was not. Five weeks out, Obama announced a modest package of nine executive orders and four pieces of legislation, including expanded background checks, along with bans on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and armor-piercing bullets. But the outrage had already cooled. Despite several bipartisan compromises, all the proposed bills died in the Senate. Even the modest Manchin-Toomey Amendment, a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks to Internet and gun-show sales, failed.
It was one day after Sandy Hook that Watts started a Facebook group that evolved into Moms Demand Action, which later merged with Mike Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns to form Everytown for Gun Safety. Sandy Hook also inspired Gabby and Kelly in 2013 to create the organization that would evolve into Giffords Courage.
Everytown and Giffords Courage both grew into political powerhouses, with Everytown’s army of moms providing the ground force and Giffords organizing the inside game. Heading into 2018, Giffords Courage felt the political winds were finally favorable enough to proceed to stage four, in which a phalanx of candidates would run aggressively on guns. They were deep into the vetting phase when Parkland happened. On Valentine’s Day, a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. The shooting was tragically familiar, but the survivors’ response was new.
NRA fundraising has sputtered, and it finished 2018 $36 million in the red. The organization has been plagued by reports of lavish spending and profiteering by executives. A bitter power struggle between its president, Oliver North, and executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, resulted in North’s ouster last year, followed by the resignation of eight board members and sweeping layoffs.
One step remains in the Giffords Courage five-stage program. Gabby couldn’t make the 2020 election about gun safety. A presidential nominee could. This election will be decided by COVID-19, but by going so big on guns, Biden has all but ensured that a victory for his ticket will usher in historic change. And that dynamic was cemented in 2019. The October Gun Safety Forum was Giffords’s pivotal event.
COVID-19 scuttled Gabby’s 2020 plans to hit the road hard in every state that could decide the presidency and control of the Senate. But lockdown also presented an opportunity. In February, in the lull before the nomination, she had begun work on a speech. When the pandemic hit, Gabby hatched a new plan: She would master a speech—the longest she’d attempted since the Safeway shooting—to deliver at the Democratic National Convention.
An opening montage shows Gabby raising two fingers to “speak” from her hospital bed, returning to Congress emaciated, and practicing her speech. “He was there for me,” Gabby says. “He’ll be there for you too.” She hits the line, and high-fives Fabi. You can see how hard she’s been working, but did you imagine she’d put in 130 hours of practice?
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