Gabby Giffords

Gabby Giffords (born June 8, 1970, Tucson, Arizona, U.S.) is an American Democratic politician who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2012. In January 2011, she was the victim of an assassination attempt.

Giffords grew up in Tucson and attended Scripps College in Claremont, California, where in 1993 she received a B.A. in sociology and Latin American history. After studying in Chihuahua, Mexico, on a Fulbright scholarship and completing a master’s degree in regional planning from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Giffords took a position as an associate at an accounting firm in New York City. She returned to Tucson shortly thereafter to become, in 1997, president and CEO of her family’s business, El Campo Tire Warehouses. Three years later she sold the company and was elected to the Arizona state legislature as a Democrat. (Although she had been inspired by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to register as a Republican at age 18, Giffords switched her affiliation in 1999 after realizing that her views on social issues were more in line with the Democratic Party.) She later served in the state Senate (2003–05) before winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives amid a wave of Democratic victories in 2006.

As a member of Congress, Giffords was considered a centrist Democrat. Although she allied herself with the Blue Dog Coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats, she supported many of the economic policies of Pres. Barack Obama. While she was a vocal advocate of immigration reform—her congressional district bordered Mexico—she opposed a particularly stringent Arizona law enacted in 2010 that targeted illegal immigrants. Additionally, Giffords championed legislation on renewable energy and in 2009–11 chaired the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics. (She had married astronaut Mark Kelly in 2007.)

As a Democrat in a state that leaned Republican, Giffords sometimes faced fierce political opposition. In 2010, after she voted for the health care bill that was later enacted as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, her office in Tucson was vandalized. Later that year she endured an aggressive challenge to her seat from Republican candidate Jesse Kelly, who was backed by Tea Party supporters; Giffords won reelection by only a slim margin. On January 8, 2011, while hosting a “Congress on Your Corner” meeting with constituents in the parking lot of a supermarket in Tucson, Giffords was shot in the head by Jared Lee Loughner, a constituent she had met at a similar event several years earlier. Giffords survived the attack, though six people, including a nine-year-old girl, were killed and 12 others were injured.

While Loughner’s motivations were not immediately clear, the event prompted many politicians and media pundits to call for a reduction of the bellicose rhetoric that was a characteristic feature of early 21st-century American politics. Several months after the shootings, Loughner was ruled unfit to stand trial, but after receiving extensive medical treatment for schizophrenia, he was allowed to plead guilty. In November 2012 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In May 2011, after several months of rehabilitation, Giffords attended a launch of the space shuttle Endeavour, which was commanded by her husband. The following month she was released from the hospital, though she continued to receive treatment as an outpatient. In August Giffords returned to Washington, D.C., to vote for a bill that increased the debt ceiling. Three months later she and her husband published Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope (written with Jeffrey Zaslow). In January 2012 Giffords resigned from the House of Representatives, citing the need to focus on her recovery.

Giffords later supported stricter gun-control laws, and in 2013 she and her husband founded Americans for Responsible Solutions. Three years later it merged with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence to form the advocacy organization Giffords. In 2019 Kelly announced that he was running for the Senate, and Giffords took an active role in his campaign. Kelly was elected in 2020. That year she endorsed Joe Biden in the presidential race. He won, and in 2022 he presented Giffords with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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