Then the shooter turned his fire on the crowd. There was an eerie silence as he swapped out the magazines, and three people leaped up. The three men fell to the pavement, and the loaded magazine skittered across the ground. The gunman groped for it, but year-old Patricia Maisch hopped up and snatched it away. They all held him down, while a wounded man grabbed the pistol.

He rushed out, his Ruger P95 pistol drawn. Zamudio spotted the armed man easily, freed the safety on his Ruger, pressed his finger to the trigger, and prepared to fire. Zamudio was aiming not at the shooter but at the victim who had recovered the gun. The man complied. He held his foot over the Glock, and the others subdued the gunman until police arrived. 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.

All of a sudden, her eyes started to flutter. Can you hear me? And you have no idea the joy in that room. She understood the words of her husband.

I hear you. I can see. It was shocking. President Obama came to Tucson with Michelle for a national memorial service that day, and visited Gabby. Gabby opened her eyes! Every day, the odds she ever would sank. Her friend Brad Holland borrowed an electric piano from her music therapist.

She had a favorite duet she joined him on at Bradlandia, so he tried it on the Casio. And the next morning she got up and she talked. Brad is a colorful storyteller, and that yarn bobbed along for 10 minutes over brunch at their favorite diner last December, including the setup story about Bradlandia. Periodically, Gabby would reel him back with one-word interjections— piano, muumuu, chickens —and he responded to each cue.

Brad performed the story; Gabby conducted. Gabby was warned that the first year or two of recovery would be brutal, but what followed could be even harder psychologically: the plateau.

Minor gains would require grueling, relentless, mind-numbing effort. Gabby scoffs at the thought of giving up. They said gun safety was impossible too. They kept the large bone fragments alive so they could re-implant them, only to wind up using synthetic bone for her reconstructive surgery.

At first, Gabby was determined to return to Congress. And she did, briefly. After a year of punishing therapy, she could still speak only haltingly and could barely move the right side of her body. A drain was inserted to divert excess brain fluid, and she will never recover the lost vision.

She had years of recovery ahead, and she could not do the job the way she intended. On January 25, , just over a year after the shooting, she appeared on the floor of the House to vote on an anti-drug-smuggling bill she had coauthored—and to submit her resignation.

Boehner wept as she submitted her letter of resignation, and the standing ovation was deafening on both sides of the aisle. Gabby spent focused on recovery. She has a giggly prankster personality. A year-old man with a history of mental disorders killed his mother and then attacked Sandy Hook Elementary School.

He murdered six faculty members and 20 little kids in their first-grade classrooms. He appointed Biden to lead a task force. Gun legislation had failed after Columbine, and again after Virginia Tech, but traction had seemed to be building, and the horror of dead six- and seven-year-olds seemed more potent than a Senate filibuster.

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.

Four Republicans crossed over to vote for it, but five Democrats crossed the other way. Call it the Hodges Doctrine. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over. Sandy Hook also inspired Gabby and Kelly in to create the organization that would evolve into Giffords Courage.

Today, the NRA has two major adversaries, neither of which existed seven years ago. The Hodges Doctrine has it backward: Sandy Hook was the birth of the modern gun-safety movement. The NRA is just too powerful; the politics are too tough. The senators were right: The NRA was too powerful. No matter how grave the horror or fierce the public outcry, the politicians would ignore it until someone proved it was safe to vote their conscience, here on earth.

They were sure candidates could win on guns. The problem was getting them to run on it. They have to be elected because of , not in spite of, their support for gun safety. And the only way you get a popular mandate is to talk about the issue. And then of course to win. The Giffords Courage team devised a five-stage plan to pass the sort of landmark legislation Biden has finally proposed: 1 Put some legislative wins on the board; 2 devise a winning message; 3 prove it out in key test elections; 4 coax candidates to run on gun safety in numbers that would overwhelm NRA resources; 5 take the House, Senate, and White House, all with a mandate for change.

Florida police said the law kept them from charging and arresting George Zimmerman for fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager, in Zimmerman was finally arrested after a public outcry, only to be acquitted under the self-defense statute. Georgia police used the same reasoning this spring when they waited 10 weeks before arresting two men in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, another unarmed Black man.

It took another two weeks to arrest a third man for blocking his escape. All three have since been charged and have pleaded not guilty. At first, the state battles felt futile, as the NRA kept racking up wins. But the safety movement was gaining intel for the next stage: testing messages while rapidly building the infrastructure to compete.

This meant funding sources, volunteers, lobbyists, lawyers, policy wonks, communications people, market testers. Getting the message right was essential. Gabby had the instincts, because she grew up in the heart of gun country. She gets the NRA demo because she is that demo.

They pitched ideas, hashed them out with candidates, and then tested the hell out of them. Gabby stepped down from Congress in January to focus on her recovery. In , after the tragic mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, Gabby co-founded the organization today known as Giffords. Over the past several years, the organization has been a leader in the national gun safety movement, making gun safety a kitchen table issue for voters.

Giffords has helped gun safety champions win up and down the ballot in local, state, and federal races and worked hard to pass lifesaving legislation in states across the country and in the US House of Representatives. As she leads Giffords, Gabby continues to make remarkable progress in her recovery. Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona shooting survivor — A framed photograph of Giffords stands at the center of a memorial during a candlelight vigil at the University Medical Center on January 8, The congresswoman was shot in the head during an event that day in front of a Safeway grocery store in Tucson, Arizona.

Six people were killed. The gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in It was one of the first photographs of her released after the shooting. Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona shooting survivor — Giffords, at left, leads the Pledge of Allegiance during a vigil held at the University of Arizona Mall on the anniversary of the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, on January 8, Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona shooting survivor — After resigning from Congress, Giffords is escorted down the hall by Rep.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida on January 25, Giffords left office to focus on her recovery. The bill was the last piece of legislation Giffords voted on before she resigned. The former congresswoman delivered an opening statement to the committee, which met for the first time since the mass shooting at a Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona shooting survivor — Giffords and Kelly attend a news conference on March 6, outside the Safeway grocery store in Tuscon.

At the event they urged Congress to provide stricter gun control in the United States. At left, Roxanna Green holds a photo of her daughter, Christina Taylor Green, who was killed in the shooting. Ron Barber and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz during a dedication ceremony on April 16, for Gabriel Zimmerman, a member of Gifford's staff who was murdered during the January 8 shooting spree. Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona shooting survivor — Giffords completed an mile cycling event on November 22, marking another milestone in her recovery from a mass shooting, tweeting "Kicking off 11 miles in El Tour de Tucson.

Beautiful day for a bike ride! Giffords, sympathy for Jared Loughner, and consternation with Congress. The shooting was not an isolated incident. Congress itself was the target of another man with untreated mental illness who shot two police officers at the U.

Capital building in Every year an estimated one thousand individuals with severe mental illness who are left untreated kill. Over , people with untreated severe mental illness wander the streets, many foraging dumpsters for food and screaming at voices only they can hear.