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In recent weeks, after she was one of only a handful of Democratic moderates to win re-election amid the great Republican party wave, congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who represents a conservative district in Arizona, told friends that bipartisanship in Washington was getting tougher and that middle-ground voices like hers were being drowned out by the extremes. A high-energy motorcycle aficionado whose youthful looks and sincere manner made her seem younger than her 40 years, she had received death threats, and her constituency office door had been vandalized, possibly shot in.
A former Fulbright scholar, Arizona state senator, and CEO of a tire business founded by her grandfather, Giffords was a rising star in the Democratic party, which she joined after switching from the Republicans in 1999, and was starting to garner national attention. Centrism has long been part of her politics. During the 2006 congressional campaign that sent her to Washington, she wrote a letter to constituents aimed at garnering the votes of independent voters and centrist Republicans. “Growing up, my mother was a Republican and my father was a Democrat—so I learned about ‘bipartisanship’ from an early age,” Giffords wrote. In the House, she was a member of the conservative Democrat “Blue Dog Coalition.” She sought out a middle ground on various issues: she was for tougher border security, but supported immigration reform that would provide undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. She voted for health care reform, but this month voted against Nancy Pelosi for minority leader.
Her dependence on conservative voters made her a prime political target for the Republicans. In March, Giffords’s district appeared on an online map posted by Sarah Palin of 20 congressional races where Democrats in previously Republican districts had voted for health care reform. They were marked with gun-sight crosshairs. On Twitter, Palin tweeted: “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” Later, Giffords’s Republican opponent, a former Marine named Jesse Kelly, advertised a “Target for Victory” campaign event at a shooting range. “Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office,” he asked his supporters. “Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” The violent imagery worried Giffords during an MSNBC appearance: “We need to realize that the rhetoric, and the firing people up and . . . for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s ‘targeted’ list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we’re in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action.”
But for all that, Giffords was neither bitter nor combative. She did not raise her voice. Perhaps befitting the wife of an astronaut, her attitude was one of calm determination. One of those with whom she shared her concerns, congressional analyst Norman Ornstein, told Maclean’s they talked “all about the coarsening of the discourse, and the danger it poses to the republic.”
Danger, indeed. Last January, Sharron Angle, a Tea Party-backed candidate for the Senate in Nevada, told a radio host that “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies,” and talked of “taking out” her opponent, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid (the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms). Protesters attending town hall meetings on health care reform in 2009 had carried guns, and a man carrying an assault weapon got within a city block of a presidential speech in Phoenix. The tone continued to concern Giffords. On the night of Jan. 7, she sent an email to a friend, Kentucky’s departing Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson, to congratulate him on his new position at Harvard University. “After you get settled, I would love to talk about what we can do to promote centrism and moderation,” she wrote in an email obtained by the Associated Press. “I am one of only 12 Dems left in a GOP district (the only woman) and think that we need to figure out how to tone our rhetoric and partisanship down.”
On the morning of Saturday, Jan. 8, the woman described by many as a voice of reason was gunned down during a meeting with constituents outside a supermarket in Tucson, in a horrific shooting that left her fighting for her life after suffering a bullet wound to her head. Six other people died in the attack, including nine-year-old Christina Green, a Grade 3 student born on Sept. 11, 2001, who had recently joined her school’s student council and was brought to the meeting by a neighbour so she could meet a real politician. John Roll, the state’s chief federal judge, was killed, as was Gifford’s director of outreach, Gabe Zimmerman, and three retirees. Another 13 people were injured. The alleged assailant, Jared Lee Loughner, 22, an erratic loner who had exhibited clear signs of mental illness that had terrified his teachers and classmates at Pima Community College, was captured on the scene while attempting to reload his Glock 9 mm semi-automatic pistol.
It was a shooting that shocked the country, and plunged the United States into a debate about America’s pervasive gun culture, how a deeply troubled individual could so easily fly under the radar and obtain a weapon, and whether the tragedy could transform the increasingly bitter and volatile discourse that has marred American politics—or only make it worse.
Jimmy Luu, receptionist at the Nails Arts salon in Tucson, thought the first shots were firecrackers. Then he heard screams and saw people running through the parking lot in front of the Safeway supermarket, where Giffords was holding one of her regular Congress on Your Corner events. He was afraid one of those running toward the salon was the shooter. His manager locked the door, and everyone ran into the back of the shop.
Fifty metres away, inside the Beyond Bread deli and bakeshop, milling customers and the clatter of plates drowned out the pistol shots. A woman burst through the doors, wide-eyed and hyperventilating. “I thought she was sick,” Elaine Navarro, an employee at the deli, told Maclean’s. “My manager said, ‘Get her a chair.’ ” Navarro fetched one. She asked the woman if she needed water. The woman didn’t answer. She gathered herself and shouted: “Call 911. There’s been a shooting at Safeway.”
The attack was both an attempted political assassination and a mass murder. Giffords was shot first, through the head at point-blank range. She is now in critical condition. The gunman, Loughner, then began shooting at everyone around her. Also among the dead were Phyllis Schneck, a great-grandmother, Dorothy Morris, 76, who died despite her husband’s attempts to shield her with his body, and Dorwin Stoddard, also 76, who threw himself on top of his wife, Mavy, when the shooting started. She was shot three times in the leg but survived.
It appears Loughner specifically targeted Giffords. The FBI says it has recovered from a safe in Loughner’s home an envelope with Giffords’s name written on it, and the words: “I planned ahead” and “my assassination.” Court papers say the envelope also contains “what appears to be Loughner’s signature.” Also in the safe was a letter addressed to Loughner from Giffords, in which she thanked him for attending a constituent event in 2007.
