Gabby Giffords is a retired politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives representing Arizona's 8th congressional district from January 2007 until January 2012. Her political career was tragically cut short when she was nearly killed during an attempted assassination at a constituent event in Arizona in 2011.
Since then, Giffords has been an advocate for gun control and with her husband launched Americans for Responsible Solutions, a non-profit with the stated goal “to encourage elected officials to stand up for solutions to prevent gun violence and protect responsible gun ownership." In 2016, the organization merged with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and is now named the Giffords Law Center.
Gabrielle Dee Giffords was born in 1970 and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She double majored in sociology and Latin American history at Scripps College in California and received her bachelor’s in 1993. She then studied for a year in Chihuahua, Mexico, on a J. William Fulbright Scholarship. After earning a master’s in urban planning from Cornell University, she worked for six months at a New York consultancy before returning to Tucson to run her family’s tire business.
Giffords began her political career in 2001 when she was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives. She then won election to the state senate in 2002 with more than 74% of the vote and became at the time the youngest woman ever elected to that body. She was re-elected in 2004 but resigned a year later to run for Congress.
On January 8, 2011, Giffords was holding a “Congress on Your Corner” event outside a Tucson grocery store. During the meet-and-greet with constituents, a gunman shot Giffords in the head and killed six others, including a federal judge and one of Giffords’s aides. Remarkably, after being placed in an induced coma to allow her brain to rest, she survived and began the arduous journey to recovery.
Giffords officially resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives on January 24, 2012, to a standing ovation from her colleagues. She continues the fight to this day for gun control advocacy, and in July 2022 she was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden.