But the Giffords Courage goal is even more audacious. Gabrielle Giffords was born June 8, , just outside Tucson, on the edge of the vast, unforgiving Sonoran Desert. She grew up on horseback, inseparable from Buckstretcher, her trusty Appaloosa. She dressed in leather jackets and Doc Martens and had an angelic smile and tousled chestnut hair that looked far too luxurious for a second grader mucking out the manure at Bel Air Stables.
She competed in hunter-jumper competitions, prodding half-ton stallions to leap solid barriers. Gabby tried to bring her horse to Cornell, then took up racing motorcycles. When she ran for Congress, she would tell audiences her political training began at age eight, when she first learned to shovel horse shit.
Gabby was born with an insatiable curiosity about what made people tick. In grade school, she volunteered to teach in a Spanish-English exchange program. She spent a semester in Spain in high school, and later a year in Chihuahua, Mexico, as a Fulbright Scholar. No one was surprised when she married an astronaut. When she started dating Mark Kelly, he had already witnessed an earthrise.
He had piloted the space shuttle Endeavour , and would later pilot and then command missions on Discovery. She married Kelly in a borrowed Vera Wang dress, on a working Arizona farm. The reception featured freshly made tortillas, a mariachi band, and a military saber arch.
She said reading a tire taught her how to read legislation later: Identify the weak spots. In Tucson, Gabby surrounded herself with a colorful menagerie of friends. Brad Holland looks like a young Dr.
John, with his three-inch goatee and gold hoop earrings. His friends call it Bradlandia. It beat anything Gabby had encountered in Greenwich Village, and she moved in. Eventually Gabby sold the company to Goodyear and turned her attention from studying people to trying to help them.
She was elected to the Arizona House and then, at 32, became the youngest woman to serve in the state senate. She had her eye on Congress, but she was still too young and green. Worse, she was a Democrat in a district that was reliably red. But then, in , he did. The leap felt premature, but openings like that are rare, so she jumped in. She beat a prominent TV newscaster for the nomination and then trounced a conservative immigration hawk by 12 points in the general.
She ran and legislated as a moderate, pro-business Democrat and rarely mentioned guns. She respected the Second Amendment and enjoyed exercising it.
She has long kept a Glock in a safe at her house in Tucson, where the walls are hung with paintings of cowgirls and cowboys on horseback. Joe Biden worked closely with the Giffords Courage team on his gun-safety agenda. Biden has embraced most of the measures spelled out in the MFOL Peace Plan, including urban-violence intervention programs, which were a big focus of the Vegas forum. Mass shootings are horrific but account for a minute fraction of the carnage. Two thirds of gun deaths are suicides.
The vast majority of the remainder are urban homicides. Black men account for 6 percent of the U. Black Americans are 10 times more likely than whites to be killed with a gun. Most gun suicides are impulsive acts, so anything that blocks instantaneous access to a weapon helps, including waiting periods, biometric safety locks, red-flag laws, and mental-health restrictions on permits. The key to slashing urban homicides is breaking the cycle of violence.
Once gunfire erupts, it tends to cycle up quickly, with escalating rounds of payback. But community-based teams have discovered a prime venue for staging interruptions: the emergency room.
There is a brief window after a shooting to mediate a solution between rival gangs, who typically want to avoid going to war. It is also the moment the wounded young man is most inclined to rethink his relationship with gun violence.
Hospital-based violence intervention, as the strategy is known, has proven wildly successful. Programs in several states have slashed homicides by as much as 60 percent. It attributed some of the spike in urban gun violence between and to a reaction to police violence and growing distrust of law enforcement. David Kennedy puts it more bluntly.
He is director of the National Network for Safe Communities, whose research was cited throughout the report. Hospital interventions pull cops out of the equation, shifting that role to people like pastors, social service workers, and neighborhood moms. The only obstacle is funding. I met Gabby backstage for the first time in Las Vegas, minutes before she opened the forum.
Her fragmented speech was the second thing I noticed. The first was the way she uses eye contact. Once she locked in, it was hard to look away. She laughs frequently, with her whole body, shoulders swooping forward, blond curls bouncing. Gabby is relentlessly curious and not shy about drawing conclusions. Small talk collapses to intimacy on first contact. His look was impeccable, almost, but Gabby reached in to tweak a stray lock of his salt-and-pepper hair.
He blushed like a schoolboy, and his chin dipped. Gay , I was tempted to say. Body issues. She was going to get it out of me, and by our next meeting, she did.
Listening is a skill, but eliciting is an art form. Her speeches connected because of the curiosity that informed them.
Smith served with Gabby on the Armed Services Committee, and as chairman of the terrorism subcommittee he oversaw congressional delegations to some of the nastiest spots on the planet. A bunch of old men gawking at lasers, explosives, and Star Wars toys—and angling for contracts to manufacture them in their home districts. Some of the questions she was asking were—truthfully, they were very feminine, and thus welcome. How are you living? Three days later, her new life would begin.
It was 50 degrees when Gabby pulled up at a. The setup was basic: a table from her office, 10 comfy chairs, a banner, rope and guideposts, and U. The fanciest touch was the Italianate awning sheltering the entrance to Safeway No. The logo depicted a gun barrel pointed at them while they played. Gabby was dressed smartly: a simple red blazer and red beaded necklace over a black blouse and skirt. This morning, it included a federal judge, a retired Army colonel named Bill Badger, and a nine-year-old girl named Christina Taylor-Green, eager to learn about politics from the most successful woman in the state.
Behind him, in the photo, are the American flag and a ghostly arrangement of shadows in the storefront glass.
At a. A constituent later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia thrust forward. He wore earplugs and a gray hoodie that matched the color he had painted his Glock Safe Action pistol.
It looked so small, the photographer remembered—almost swallowed up in his hand. The gunman—his name largely forgotten, as it should be—left a lengthy paper trail documenting his obsession with Gabby.
Though he would initially be found mentally unfit to stand trial, he passed a background check. Six weeks later, he struck. Gabby collapsed, presumed dead. 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. This article is from the archive of our partner. First Impact "A bullet first destroys tissue that lies in its path, which for Giffords was on the left side of the brain," explains Erika Check Hayden at Nature News.
This pressure wave activates all the neurons through which it passes. The neurons then attempt to restore their resting electrochemical balance by absorbing water, resulting in brain swelling. The Craniectomy "During surgery, the doctors at Arizona's University Medical Center removed a large portion of Giffords' skull to allow the brain to swell without being damaged," explains Tracy Staedter at Discovery News.
Her Response "Over the last several days, Ms. Giffords has repeatedly given nonverbal responses to her doctors' commands, they said, and CAT scan X-rays have shown that there is no swelling, which continues to be the most serious threat," reports Jennifer Medina at The New York Times. Doctors again declined to give some specific details about Ms. Sometimes Bullet Wounds Are Less Pernicious "Neurosurgeons distinguish between 'penetrating' injuries, such as bullets that go through the brain, and 'blunt' injuries, which refer to the trauma of hitting one's head against an object or the floor," reports Elizabeth Landau at CNN.
The frontal lobe is the part of the brain involved with executive function, like organizing, and higher cognitive functions like behavior and emotions. It also controls some motor function, and if injured it can cause muscle weakness, according to Dr. The temporal lobe controls memory, including visual and verbal memory. Names, places and faces are stored here. The parietal lobe on the left side can be associated with spoken and written language, and on the right side with spatial and visual understanding and sensation, according to Dr.
The occipital lobe is where we process visual input, according to Levine. It helps us recognize shapes, colors, and other visual anomalies. In these type of injuries doctors pay close attention to how the injury affects the Broca's area and Wernicke's area of the brain—the two parts that control speech and language.
Centers of speech and movement are only "a few centimeters apart," and so a patient could have just an isolated speech injury and be spared disabilities in movement, said Dr. Speech is very complicated, according to Germanwala; it requires not only the ability to communicate verbally, but to comprehend and to know when to move the lips. Broca's area is a part of the brain that controls one aspect of language, and is associated with deficits in fluency of speech, said Dr.
So patients with Broca's aphasia—or language impairment- comprehend language they hear, but their words can come out wrong. Patients mean to say one thing, but another comes out. Broca's aphasia can be particularly frustrating for patients, Levine noted. Wernicke's area controls the meaning of language, so a person with Wernicke's aphasia sounds very fluent, can speak a mile a minute, and might have their nouns properly associated with their verbs, but makes little sense when they speak, Levine said.
Patients also have trouble understanding what they're hearing when other people speak to them. Levine said both Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia repond very well to speech therapy, and patients can continue improving for years. In an emergency surgery after she was shot, a portion of Gabrielle Giffords' skull was removed to ease the stress and pressure on her brain due to swelling.
It is a common procedure in these types of brain injuries and must be monitored because if left unchecked the swelling possibly can further damage sensitive brain tissue.
In a follow-up procedure, a team led by Dr.
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