In our September feature “True Stories About the Great Fire,” which recounts the first 14 days of protests after the murder of George Floyd, Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, makes this critical point about the genesis of the demonstrations: “It’s important for us to remember that what we see today is built on the platform of what we saw in Ferguson and what we saw in Baltimore,” she said. “I think some people think that the activism went away, but it didn’t.”
Some people think that the activism went away, but it didn’t. You’ll hear that note sound again in this issue, in Dave Cullen’s deeply reported profile of Gabby Giffords and her gun-safety movement. Giffords’s organization developed a five-part program put into effect seven years ago, and the last big step, Dave writes, will play out in this fall’s election. Through news cycle after news cycle, through recurring declarations that the gun control debate in America had been effectively silenced by the inaction after Sandy Hook, Giffords and her team have been working, patiently and steadily—forming alliances, collaborating with community groups and with candidates for office up to and including Joe Biden. “From the outside, it looked like the NRA was still steamrolling,” Dave writes, “but legislative victories are lagging indicators. Gabby saw the plan succeeding, and the battleground shifting below the NRA, which ended 2018 in disarray.” Now her sights are set on November 3.
The organization’s full name is Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence. The word courage is directed at politicians, whom Giffords has convinced to embrace the issue of gun safety in their campaigns rather than run from it. It was a strategy radical in its clarity. Anyone who saw her appearance at the Democratic National Convention in August has an inkling of what courage means to Giffords herself, what strength it has taken for her to return to the national stage after she was shot in the head at point-blank range in January 2011. This woman, who had never lost an election and was just getting started on a political career that knew no bounds, has instead devoted her life to recovery—not just her own, but that of a nation deeply scarred by self-inflicted gun violence. If you think it’s a losing battle, you haven’t met Gabby Giffords.
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