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Four months is a long time these days.
At least for me, it used to be that four months was a bit of a jog but easily contextualized in the brain’s aerial view. I could look backwards and easily spot that marker. Now, it seems, the space-time continuum has been cruelly mocked and warped by current events in such a way that a month in 2022 honestly feels legitimately equal to a quarter in 2011 and looking backward that far, even that much, is a fool’s errand, only bound to disappoint.
Whatever you were doing four months ago, the world continues to indifferently spin into spun-up difference from what it once was. Four months ago was before 19 children and two teachers were murdered in Uvalde, TX. Four months ago was before a white supremacist murdered ten innocents, targeting the Black community in Buffalo, NY. Four months ago was before—wait, be honest with me: without looking it up, how easily can you recall the details of that horrific mass shooting on the New York City Subway in April?
That wasn’t even four months ago.
Exactly four months ago yesterday, I was at SXSW watching the world premiere of “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down”, a documentary about the former Arizona congresswoman who survived a brutal assassination attempt in 2011 that left six others murdered and has since been on a journey of remarkable advocacy, both in her medical rehabilitation after being shot in the head at point-blank range and the widely-praised leadership role she has undertaken in the gun reform movement.
The documentary is superb, and we’ll get to that in a second. I want to further underline that four months ago was a completely different world, especially for the families in Highland Park and Tulsa and Uvalde and Buffalo and Pittsburgh and Sacramento and I wouldn’t blame you at all for missing details on a few of these.
In America in 2022, it’s hard for even the most news-centric among us to keep up with the mass shootings that make national news, let alone the unending cascade of underreported mass shootings that tear through communities across the country.
Since March 12th, 2022—the date of the world premiere at SXSW—there have been 250 mass shootings, according to The Gun Violence Archive.
In other words, there has been an average of more than two mass shootings per day since Gabby Giffords premiered her deeply moving and galvanizing documentary in Austin. More than twice daily has there been a mass shooting in the United States over the past four months.
More than twice daily. Think about that.
This past Monday, July 11th, was a good day for America but particularly meaningful for Gabby Giffords and every other survivor and advocate in the gun reform movement.
Just before noon, President Biden presided over a ceremony on the White House South Lawn to celebrate the signing of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first gun reform legislation signed into law in three decades.
Brilliantly shepherded through the notoriously inept upper chamber by Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), the law does a hell of a lot more than we’ve seen in recent memory and yet has also drawn criticism for falling well short of what our lawmakers should be doing to curb gun violence in America.
That’s an observation which, forgive me, seems pretty goddamn redundant. Of course it doesn’t do enough. No bill short of taking every single common sense measure would be enough in this crisis. Universal background checks are common sense. Registration of every firearm is common sense. Proper licensing for every gun owner is common sense. Banning civilian ownership of assault weapons is common sense.
The absence of any of these in a bill would make the legislation inherently flawed, even if they were the sole absence. That must be the good faith reading of any rational adult in government.
But our government is not flush to the gills with rational adults, and so, the most rational adults must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Let me state resolutely: this new law is substantial progress and deserves celebration, and I personally don’t need more than a moment’s thought to understand that many thousands of lives will be saved because of it. That is worth celebrating.
Of course it’s not enough. Why would it ever be enough?
Eighteen years from now, thousands of children will have just graduated from high school who would have otherwise been brutally murdered in a mass shooting or by an abusive relative or by themselves with an unsecured firearm in their home after being purchased by a domestic abuser.
I was there on Monday with hundreds of other attendees. I saw Manuel Oliver stand up in the middle of the President’s remarks, not far in front of me, and let the world know this isn’t enough. That’s true. It’s not enough. He has every right to be angry at the pace of all this. The man lost his child. That is a pain I can’t begin to fathom.
I also saw numerous advocates carrying full-size photographs of their slain loved ones, far too many of those being a child’s school portrait, coming up to President Biden and other elected officials to thank them for taking a few steps forward, saving a few more thousand lives, giving a few more million people a bit more hope for the future.
It seemed like just about every single gun reform advocate in the country was at this ceremony and almost all were willing to express two thoughts simultaneously: that this bill is a good thing, won through dogged advocacy, and it’s also not nearly enough.
This new legislation wouldn’t have been possible without countless advocates doing the labor for so many years, and even so, Gabby Giffords’ story is one of those that stands out among that extraordinary crowd. A few hours after the ceremony, many of us made our way downtown to the U.S. Navy Memorial Plaza for the D.C. premiere of her documentary.
Four months is a long time, as we’ve now established, and I could feel the difference between the screenings. I didn’t feel as depressed or worn out in Austin. Maybe it was the lack of national reporting on mass shootings in the first quarter of this year, but the whole situation seemed to significantly lessen in its incessant horror for a bit, certainly nothing like the gauntlet of terror to which we’ve all been witness since April.
And yet, there was hope. Had we not all just been at the White House to observe some significant steps forward? The documentary seemed to match this balanced tone of grounded optimism and brutal honesty perfectly, beat for beat.
The filmmakers, Julie Cohen and Betsy West, previously won widespread critical claim for their documentaries on the late Justice Ginsburg (2018), Pauli Murray (2021), and Julia Child (2021), public figures navigating the exceedingly thorny intersection of power, influence, and gender.
“Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down” is firmly within that tradition of excellence while also capturing a potent urgency that confronts the violent uncertainty of this hellish era in which we live. For a long time, there has existed a muted paranoia throughout the nation, a feeling that any of us could be next in a mass shooting. But the decline of our institutions and a corresponding decline of faith in our institutions and the ripped stitches of January 6th, raw and festering and wholly unclean, have added an additional and formidable layer of desperation to our national mood.
How the hell are we gonna fix this when the tools required to fix it need fixing themselves?
The documentary doesn’t blow smoke but it also refuses to back down from the claim that we can get through this together, if only we had the faith in each other to do so.
Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly have that kind of faith in each other, and it shows.
So… the story.
It was 2006, and Gabrielle Dee Giffords, a 36 year-old former CEO of her grandfather’s local tire company, had seemingly come out of nowhere to win a congressional seat covering an area the GOP had held for more than 20 years.
She had sold the business in 2000, did two years in the state house, two years in the state senate, and then launched a long shot bid to win in a district where the Republican incumbent had trounced both of the Democratic challengers in the two previous election cycles by more than 24 points.
Well, the GOP incumbent, Jim Kolbe, decided not to run for reelection and the more moderate GOP candidate most likely to succeed him was plunged into scandal and GOP voters chose a far more conservative successor and Democrats nationwide had one hell of a year in effective political messaging (on their way to taking back the House), and suddenly, this seat seemed very much up for grabs.
But that all still fails to account for the magnitude of the pendulum rebound that occurred in Arizona’s 8th congressional district that year. Giffords didn’t win a nail-biter. She didn’t simply take the edge in a photo finish.
She won by more than 12 points, a swing of 36 points among voters from Republican to Democrat in only two years. It wasn’t just that she won in a landslide but that she did so in a district that was overwhelmingly Republican-supporting.
And she did this while being unapologetically pro-choice, supporting a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and refusing to agree that marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman (remember: this is 2006).
How?
The documentary highlights Giffords’ extraordinary interpersonal intelligence, at once empathetic and authentic and confident and completely disarming to even some of her most conservative constituents who didn’t support her, a dynamic on the recipient that’s described by admirers as being “gabbyfied”.
That’s not an exaggeration. Go look up interviews that Giffords did before the shooting. She sounds like a real person. She sounds like the most evolved form of a kind and well informed neighbor who truly wants to make the world a better place.
I have been a student of politics for a long time and I’ve heard countless anecdotes about Clinton and Biden and a handful of others making someone in a crowded room briefly feel like they’re the only person in the world. But even that effect carries something of a conceit that we all seem to accept: this is their job and they’re the best in the country at it and the Greats are meant to suspend reality for a few moments. It’s almost like a magic trick and we understand it’s not real and the vast majority of us are okay with that.
The thing about Gabby Giffords, what seems abundantly clear, is that she never needed the benefit of reality being suspended in order to reach someone. It wasn’t magic. It was just her.
The opening scenes of the documentary point to Giffords’ most likely trajectory back in the early aughts: a handful of terms in the House, then probably some time in the Senate, and down the road, it is implied (and quite rightly), a truly competitive candidacy for the White House from a notable swing state, probably sooner rather than later.
It was the first week of January in 2011 when Giffords and her advisors had made plans to huddle in D.C. and start prepping for a likely run against then-Sen. Jeff Flake in 2012. (By the way, can you imagine that race? She would have cleaned his clock.)
Before they could do that, there was a constituent event to attend, “Congress on Your Corner”, a feature of her district outreach that had become a high priority for Giffords.
It was supposed to be 90 minutes of greeting folks and talking out their concerns in front of the Safeway in La Toscana Village. Just past 10am, as Giffords and her staff engaged with constituents, a coward whom I refuse to name, armed with a Glock 19 pistol and several magazines he had purchased at a sporting goods store just a 12 minute drive away, walked up to the Congresswoman, shot her in the head at point blank range, and then began firing at everyone else.
Gabriel Zimmerman, 30, Gifford’s community outreach director; Dorwan Stoddard, 76, retired construction worker; Phyllis Schneck, 79, homemaker; John Roll, 63, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for Arizona; Dorothy “Dot” Morris, 76, retired secretary; and nine year-old Christina-Taylor Green, who was getting interested in civics and wanted to meet the Congresswoman.
Six deaths, 14 injured, including Giffords, in less than 60 seconds of shooting. Daniel Hernández, Jr., an intern in her office, had the wherewithal to slow Giffords’ bleeding and ensure she didn’t choke on her own blood, long enough for paramedics to arrive five minutes after the shooting started. This would save her life at a critical moment.
Gabby Giffords was pronounced dead to most of the country for at least an hour that Saturday afternoon. NPR ran with what they thought was a critical scoop, based on two unconfirmed sources, and the rest of national media did the bulk of the work in pushing it out. At one point, every major network was reporting that Giffords had been assassinated.
By the way, as much as I love NPR and certainly support their journalism, the close of their explanation and apology over this incident, more than a decade ago, is ludicrous:
“While NPR made a significant mistake that dinged its credibility, it should be commended for quickly apologizing and being transparent. Rather than hurting NPR's credibility, taking responsibility for the mistake should enhance it.”
What?
Mark Kelly, Gifford’s husband, a seasoned NASA astronaut who was then prepping for an upcoming shuttle mission, listened to a news broadcast informing him that his wife had been murdered and broke down.
As much as this documentary is about gun reform and Giffords’ journey of recovery and her love story with Kelly, that particular scene over NPR’s callous approach at the time, the normalized rush for media to be first rather than be right, is especially potent. The problem with clumsy media going for clicks and listeners rather than accuracy is one that very much persists to this day.
Did I mention that Giffords and her family have a hell of a sense of humor? I certainly didn’t expect to laugh as much as I did while watching a documentary on an assassination attempt. Throughout her recovery, Giffords, even through the dense fog of recalibrating her brain, sparks scenes with her wit and warmth.
Her chemistry with Kelly—it almost feels underwhelming to describe it that way—is the engine of the movie. During the Q&A after the D.C. screening, CNN’s Kate Bolduan asked Giffords and filmmakers Cohen and West about the undeniable theme of a “feminist marriage” between them — a true partnership between Giffords and Kelly that tracks a balanced but nuanced inverse of their public roles before and after the shooting.
Giffords eventually returned to the House in the midst of her recovery for critical votes but declined to run again, the health complications being too much to surmount at the time. Kelly, having completed his fourth shuttle mission, retired from NASA, pissed as could be about the lackluster response from Congress following the attempted assassination on his wife and gun violence generally, particularly in the wake of Sandy Hook, and launched a bid for John McCain’s old seat in the Senate.
Kelly, whom the documentary lovingly describes as far more of an engineer than a politician, is guided through his campaign by Giffords. One notable and hilarious scene shows Giffords tutoring Kelly on the maiden speech he’s scheduled to deliver following his victory against Martha McSally.
“Slow down, head up”, Giffords playfully urges Kelly, who demonstrates an impressive adaptation to a skill set he’s never needed.
For his part, Kelly’s predominant role is caregiver, tending to Giffords throughout her recovery process, keeping the family steady and optimistic, doing the emotional labor typically expected of women, and, all the while, continuing his demanding work as a literal NASA astronaut.
Cohen and West depict an ideal marriage of equals, simply two human beings who love each other and bring out the best qualities in one another’s hearts during the worst of times.
Their relationships, with each other and their kids and their close circle of friends and family, emphasize the importance of community.
I met Gabby Giffords in Austin after that screening back in March and couldn’t help but get a picture with her after the D.C. screening on Tuesday. She didn’t know me from Jane, just another admirer in the crowd, and yet, she took the time in both moments to thank me for attending, gave me a big hug, and said some encouraging words. I was most certainly gabbyfied.
Four months is a long time these days, and the world is already very, very different from March, as it will be in November, four months from now. The speed of change has become so quick, seemingly everything in flux, that we are forced, for our own sense of stability, to grab things that are steady and hold on for dear life.
It is in uncertain times that leaders who can offer us a sense of certainty shine the brightest. The Gabby Giffords who was once discussed as a likely future presidential candidate more than a decade ago is the same Gabby Giffords who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, last week.
Folks will point to her example of recovery and resilience or the work that’s been done by her organization, eponymously named “Giffords”, to educate the public on gun violence and push for common sense reform, or her general leadership in the public arena, which is more respected and influential than ever.
With humility, I would offer that none of these are the greatest achievements of Gabby Giffords. Her greatest achievement is reminding us all of the importance of community in an era through which our country has never demonstrated a greater need for it.
Four months is a long time and the world is changing quick on its own axis but Gabby Giffords, more than a decade on, even in her most vulnerable moments, hasn’t changed much at all. She’s always been right there, in the community, doing the work. If leadership means empathetic continuity, she’s among the greatest to ever take that walk.
God bless her for it.
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[“Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down” enters nationwide release in theaters this Friday, July 15th. View the trailer here. Take my word and go see it. Find showtimes here.]
Hi, I’m Charlotte Clymer, and this is Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, my Substack. It’s completely free to access and read, but if you feel so moved to support my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription: just $7/month or save money with the $70/annual sub. You can also go way above and beyond by becoming a Founding Member at $210.
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