Why Gabby Giffords' Gun-Control Push Might Actually Work
Today is the second anniversary of the shooting in Tuscon, Arizona, that killed six people and severely wounded former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and to mark the day Giffords and her husband announced a new lobbying effort to fight for more gun control — and this time gun-rights advocates might listen.
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"Americans for Responsible Solutions" is a new PAC set up by Giffords and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, with a stated aim of lobbying elected officials for better gun control measures. Their website has no specifics yet on what those measures might be, but they discussed the new push in an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer and in an op-ed in USA Today.
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With or without a specific plan, the couple make the perfect spokespeople for a movement to take more action on guns and violence. He's a NASA hero and Navy combat veteran and she's a former lawmaker who was an actual victim of gun violence. Both are gun owners and supporters of the Second Amendment, so they should be able to make a convincing argument to rein in weapons without abolishing them.
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Not only that, but the incident in which Giffords was shot also provides a perfect rebuttal to the main thrust of the NRA's current argument: that only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns. The man who finally stopped her shooter did so without using a gun—and was nearly shot by another bystander who did have a gun, and couldn't tell the difference between them.
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Here's an excerpt from the interview on ABC World News:
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