History > 2011 > USA > Gun violence (II)

Jared Lee Loughner

was described as a curious teenager

and talented saxophonist with a prestigious high school jazz band.

When he was arrested after the shooting, a deputy detected no remorse.

Looking Behind the Mug-Shot Grin of an Accused Killer

NYT

15.1.2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16loughner.html

Judge Orders Loughner

to Have Mental Exam in Missouri

March 21, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHOENIX (AP) — A federal judge on Monday ordered the suspect in the January shooting rampage in Tucson to undergo a mental evaluation at a specialized facility in Missouri as soon as possible.

The evaluation will be videotaped and provided to prosecutors and defense attorneys, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns said in his late Monday ruling. The judge also ordered that the exam be conducted no later than April 29, and that findings be reported to the court and attorneys on both sides by May 11.

Prosecutors had argued that Jared Lee Loughner's exam should be conducted at a so-called medical referral center that provides forensic services and has increased resources, and recommended the federal Bureau of Prisons facility in Springfield, Mo.

Medical referral centers use psychiatrists employed by the bureau.

Loughner's lawyers have said the exam should be done by an outside expert, not by a Bureau of Prisons employee, at a Tucson prison. They also wanted assurances that the evaluation doesn't expand into a review of their client's sanity.

Lead defense attorney Judy Clarke wrote in a court filing last week that moving Loughner would harm the defense team's efforts to develop an attorney-client relationship. The defense also was concerned that Loughner is "seriously ill," and that moving him to Missouri could worsen his state.

Loughner, 22, has pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from the Jan. 8 attack that killed six and wounded 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. She remains at a rehabilitation center in Houston as she recovers from a bullet wound to the brain.

Burns agreed that the Springfield facility is the best place for the exam, and ordered that the scope of the exam should be limited to whether Loughner is competent to stand trial, not whether he was sane at the time of the shooting.

"The question at issue is whether the defendant is presently suffering from a mental disease or defect rendering him mentally incompetent to the extent that he is unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, or to assist properly in his defense," Burns wrote.

Burns cited a memo written by Dr. Donald Lewis, chief of psychiatry for the Bureau of Prisons. He wrote that the Springfield facility is best for Loughner's exam because it "has medical staff available for neurology and other organic testing, and has far more forensic staff and full-time psychiatrists available to provide round-the-clock assistance."

Lewis also argued that the Tucson prison was inappropriate because as a high-security facility, precautions taken there would be disruptive and likely prevent an examiner from doing a thorough job.

He acknowledged that transferring Loughner would be inconvenient for defense attorneys but ruled that it is "unavoidable in light of the need to reliably and definitively resolve the question of the defendant's present competency." The judge also said the defense can visit Loughner while he is in Missouri.

Burns also wrote that the defense can seek a separate competency exam by an independent psychiatrist. "This should help assuage any concern the defense team has about the impartiality of the Springfield medical staff," Burns wrote.

Loughner's exam could take as little as a few days, and he cannot legally be held at the Springfield facility for more than a month.

Prosecutors have brought 49 counts against Loughner, including trying to assassinate Giffords, attempting to kill two of her aides, and killing U.S. District Judge John Roll and Giffords staffer Gabe Zimmerman. Loughner also is charged with causing the deaths of four others who weren't federal employees, causing injury and death to participants at a "federally provided activity" and using a gun in a crime of violence.

Many of the counts could bring a death sentence, but prosecutors have not announced if they will pursue that penalty. State charges are on hold until the federal case is complete but also carry the potential for the death penalty if Loughner is convicted.

Defense lawyers have not said if they intend to present an insanity defense.

    Judge Orders Loughner to Have Mental Exam in Missouri, NYT, 21.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/21/us/AP-US-Congresswoman-Shot-Mental-Exam.html

Cry of ‘Gun!’ Is Claimed in Fatal Shooting of Fellow Officer

March 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

Nassau County police officers who witnessed the fatal shooting of a fellow officer last weekend said that the victim was wearing his badge and that they did not hear the officer who shot him identify himself or yell anything before firing, the president of the Nassau police union said Monday.

“No one heard, ‘Stop! Police!’ ” James Carver, the president of the Nassau County Police Benevolent Association, said.

However, someone seems to have yelled something: officers have said that a civilian at the chaotic scene — possibly a retired New York City police sergeant — was heard yelling “Gun! Gun!” or words to that effect just before Officer Geoffrey J. Breitkopf, who was in plain clothes and carrying a rifle, was shot on Saturday night, Mr. Carver said.

If the account is accurate, it adds a member of a third police department, albeit retired, to the scrum of officers outside a crime scene where a lack of recognition among officers proved fatal. The officer who fired the fatal shot was from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s police department.

The union’s account of the shooting of Officer Breitkopf, 40, a 12-year veteran of the Nassau County force, also suggests that his fellow Nassau officers knew he was a police officer but that the transit agency officer who shot him, Glenn Gentile, 33, did not.

The shooting occurred outside a home in Massapequa Park where, a few minutes earlier, a deranged man, Anthony DiGeronimo, 21, had reportedly lunged at Nassau County officers with knives after a neighbor called 911 to report that he had threatened her on the street. Officers shot and killed him in his home in what the Police Department called self-defense.

Detective Vincent Garcia, a spokesman for the Nassau County Police Department, which is investigating the shooting of Officer Breitkopf, said he could not confirm the union president’s account.

Officer Gentile, 33, has been with the transit agency’s police force for five years, and his father, Roger, who died in 2007, was a Nassau police detective. Officer Gentile had been at a nearby Long Island Rail Road station with a partner when they heard the call about the situation on the Nassau County police radio frequency and responded. Interagency shows of support are not uncommon and go in both directions.

Officer Breitkopf, a member of the Nassau police’s Bureau of Special Operations, which responds to shootings and other violent situations, arrived with his partner in an unmarked car about 10 minutes after the shooting of Mr. DiGeronimo and emerged from it, in plain clothes, carrying an M4 rifle, Mr. Carver said. The officers had radioed ahead to announce their arrival on the same radio frequency that the transit agency’s officers had been monitoring, Mr. Carver said.

Officer Breitkopf, who was wearing a badge on a chain around his neck, exchanged pleasantries with Nassau County officers across the street from the DiGeronimo house and said he was going to go up for a look, Mr. Carver said.

It is unclear where Officer Gentile was when Officer Breitkopf arrived.

According to Nassau County officers at the scene, Officer Breitkopf was wearing his rifle on a sling around his shoulder, its barrel pointed down along his right side and his hand against it to keep it from banging, Mr. Carver said.

“He doesn’t have his finger on the trigger, obviously, but he has his hand on the rifle to secure it to keep it close to his body,” Mr. Carver said.

While he was walking up the lawn, someone shouted, Mr. Carver said, citing witnesses’ accounts.

“Nassau cops that were at the scene said they did hear someone yell out, ‘Gun! He’s got a gun! Gun!’ ” Mr. Carver said. Some officers said the shout may have come from a man who had identified himself as a retired New York Police Department sergeant, but it may have come from someone else, Mr. Carver said.

“We heard the same rumor,” a spokesman for the New York City Sergeants Benevolent Association said.

A New York Police Department spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said he knew nothing about a retired city sergeant at the scene.

Little was known about Officer Gentile’s career. He joined the department in 2006, a spokesman for the transit agency said. His union declined to comment, and attempts to reach him on Monday were not successful. On Sunday, the Nassau County police commissioner, Lawrence W. Mulvey, said it was unlikely that he would be charged with a crime.

In a statement, the transit agency praised its “highly trained professionals” and their multiagency operations throughout its 4,700-square-mile coverage area in New York and Connecticut. The agency’s police department and the officer involved in the shooting “are fully cooperating with Nassau County Police Department’s investigation into the tragic accidental death of Nassau County Officer Breitkopf,” the statement said.

    Cry of ‘Gun!’ Is Claimed in Fatal Shooting of Fellow Officer, NYT, 14.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/nyregion/15nassau.html

3 Law Officers Are Shot in St. Louis; One Dies

March 8, 2011
The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY

ST. LOUIS — A deputy federal marshal was killed and two other law officers were wounded in a shootout early Tuesday while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a house in South St. Louis. The man named in the warrant was pronounced dead at the scene.

Deputy United States Marshal John Perry, who was shot in the head, died Tuesday night at Saint Louis University Hospital, The Associated Press reported. Another deputy marshal was shot in the ankle and was in fair condition.

A St. Louis police officer sustained a graze wound to his face and neck, a Police Department spokeswoman said. He was treated at a hospital and released.

A spokeswoman for the Marshals Service identified the gunman as Carlos Boles, 35.

The spokeswoman, Lynzey Donahue, said the warrant for Mr. Boles contained charges relating to the assault of a law enforcement officer and the possession of a controlled substance. Court documents show that Mr. Boles, whose criminal record stretched back to 1993, pleaded guilty to five felonies.

Shortly before 7 a.m., officials said, two officers from the Police Department and eight from the Marshals Service were trying to serve the warrant when they discovered several children inside the house. After escorting the children outside, the officers began searching for Mr. Boles, who officials said opened fire when they encountered him.

After the shooting, the police cordoned off the area as a SWAT team cleared the rest of the house. Within minutes, a crowd had gathered in a park across the street, where people were trading rumors in a drizzling rain and venting anger over what they called a pointless police shooting.

“They could have just let one of his family members go in and talk to him,” said Tony Johnson, 22. “I don’t blame anyone for the tension right now.”

A man who identified himself as Mr. Boles’s brother but would not give his name said he was frustrated by the lack of information. “We don’t know what’s up,” the man said after holding back a bereaved woman. “All we know is three police were shot, and they’re pulling a body out the back.”

The shooting comes amid a violent wave in which at least 17 federal, state and local officers have been killed by gunfire so far this year, an increase of more than 23 percent over this time last year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, a nonprofit group.

That number includes the death of Derek Hotsinpiller, 24, a deputy United States marshal. He was killed last month in West Virginia while trying to serve a warrant for a man wanted on charges related to cocaine trafficking. Two other deputies were wounded in the confrontation.

At a news conference, Chief Daniel Isom of the St. Louis Police Department said that the investigation of Tuesday’s shooting was continuing and that details remained “sketchy.”

“Right now,” Chief Isom said, “we’re just praying for the officers who are injured and hope that everything works out well.”

    3 Law Officers Are Shot in St. Louis; One Dies, NYT, 8.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09stlouis.html

Tucson Autopsy Reports Are Released

March 7, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

TUCSON — Witnesses to the Tucson shooting rampage describe it in emotional language, and court documents lay it out in legalese. Now, newly released autopsy reports give a glimpse of the chilling attack from the clinical viewpoint of the forensic pathologist who examined the bodies of the six people who were killed.

“A gunshot entrance wound is at the left lower back, 24 inches from the top of the head and 3 inches left of midline,” Dr. Eric D. Peters, the deputy medical examiner for Pima County, wrote in the autopsy report for Judge John M. Roll of Federal District Court, which was released on Monday.

Dr. Peters noted that Judge Roll wore a black leather jacket, a blue shirt, a white undershirt and stone-colored pants. He had a watch on his left wrist and yellow metal ring on his left fourth finger.

For Gabriel M. Zimmerman, an aide to Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Dr. Peters noted two gunshot wounds, one to the head and another to the left buttocks. “Death of this man is due to a gunshot wound to the head with perforations of skull and brain,” he wrote.

It was Ms. Giffords, a Democrat who was holding a constituent event outside a supermarket on the morning of Jan. 8, who was the intended target of the gunman, according to the authorities, who have charged Jared L. Loughner, a troubled 22-year-old. Ms. Giffords was struck in the head and is undergoing rehabilitation in Houston after suffering a bullet to the brain. A dozen other people were also shot.

Of the six deaths, the one that drew the most attention, because of the victim’s young age, was that of Christina-Taylor Green, who was just 9 when a neighbor took her to meet her congresswoman. Christina died from a single shot that tore through her aorta, right kidney, stomach, small intestine and left hemidiaphragm, the pathologist said. “Yellow metal earrings with blue stones are in place,” he noted.

Federal prosecutors and Mr. Loughner’s defense team had sought to block release of the autopsy reports because they said they might interfere with Mr. Loughner’s ability to have a fair trial. But Dr. Bruce Parks, the Pima County medical examiner, said the reports were public documents, and he distributed them to the news media.

The wounds were varied. Some victims were hit more than once, and the pathologist noted that some also had other injuries to their heads and hands from falling to the ground.

But one thing was common to all six victims. “The manner of death,” the pathologist said again and again, “is certified as homicide.”

    Tucson Autopsy Reports Are Released, NYT, 7.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08tucson.html

Tips Lead to Teen's Arrest in Fla. Cop Killing

February 23, 2011
Filed at 3:16 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — A daylong manhunt that covered a swath of the city ended when tips led to the arrest of a 16-year-old who faces a murder charge in the shooting of a St. Petersburg police officer, the third killed in the line of duty in the past month.

Officer David Crawford was shot multiple times Monday night while investigating a report of a prowler in a neighborhood just south of Tropicana Field where the Tampa Bay Rays play baseball. About 24 hours later, officials gathered near police headquarters to announce that the teen was in custody facing a juvenile charge of first-degree murder.

The Associated Press does not routinely release the names of those under 18 years old charged with juvenile crimes.

"When he did make the admission on tape for us at the end of the day, it was quite apparent that he was remorseful in his actions," Police Chief Chuck Harmon said during a late night news conference. "He cried."

Helicopters, SWAT teams, dozens of law enforcement and dogs searched for the gunman and a chunk of the city of about 245,000 was closed to traffic for parts of Monday and into Tuesday. The FBI, the St. Petersburg Police and other groups also were offering a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the identification and arrest of the suspect.

Harmon said three tips led officers to the teen and that police were still looking for the gun. The teen had a prior juvenile criminal record but Harmon did not give details. Prosecutors will decide whether the teen will be charged as an adult. The chief said because of the seriousness of the charge and the teen's prior record that he would expect him to face adult charges.

Two officers were checking out the prowler call and Crawford, 46, spotted the suspect and got out of his car. At 10:37 p.m., another officer, Donald J. Ziglar, reported an exchange of gunfire and told dispatchers an officer was down, police said.

Ziglar found Crawford lying on the pavement near his cruiser, shot at close range, police said. Crawford was not wearing a bullet proof vest.

The suspect was taken to a juvenile lockup and his parents were cooperating, the chief said. Police did not have a motive except that there was some exchange between the teen and officer, Harmon said.

"It breaks my heart," he said. "When you have something like this happen, you don't expect this type of confrontation between a 16-year-old and a police officer to end like this."

The suspect is a student in the Pinellas County Schools, but Harmon wouldn't say which school. It wasn't clear how the boy obtained the gun, Harmon said.

Crawford, who was married, eligible for retirement and the father of an adult daughter, was pronounced dead at a hospital. Officers saluted the van that carried his body to the medical examiner's office Tuesday morning. Crawford, who loved horses, lived in a rural community north of St. Petersburg.

On Jan. 24, two St. Petersburg officers — Jeffrey A. Yaslowitz and Thomas Baitinger — were killed as they helped serve a warrant on a man with a long criminal history. Their killer died in the siege. Prior to that, the St. Petersburg Police department hadn't had an officer killed in the line of duty in more than 30 years.

"We're not even done healing from the first tragedy, then boom, we have a second one," said St. Petersburg Detective Mark Marland, who is also the police union president.

St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster said the city will now be able to bury officer Crawford and have some closure — but residents, officers and parents must also learn why a teenager was carrying a handgun.

"We as a community need to stand up and do a better job," Foster said.

___

Associated Press writer David Fischer in Miami contributed to this report.

    Tips Lead to Teen's Arrest in Fla. Cop Killing, NYT, 23.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/23/us/AP-US-Florida-Police-Shooting.html

Word and Lyric, Giffords Labors to Speak Again

February 13, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

PHOENIX — Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an eloquent speaker before she was shot in the head last month, is relearning the skill — progressing from mouthing words and lip-syncing songs to talking briefly by telephone to her brother-in-law in space.

With a group of friends and family members acting as a backup chorus, Ms. Giffords has been mouthing the lyrics to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” And as a surprise for her husband, who is celebrating his birthday this month, a longtime friend who has been helping her through her rehabilitation videotaped her mouthing the words to “Happy Birthday to You.”

“It’s not like she’s speaking the way she spoke, but she is vocalizing and making progress every day,” Pia Carusone, Ms. Giffords’s chief of staff, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “She’s working very hard. She’s determined. It’s a tight schedule. A copy of it is hanging on her door.”

Outside specialists say it remains unclear, despite the hopeful early signs, what functions in Ms. Giffords’s mind were affected by the traumatic injuries she suffered when she was shot at point-blank range on Jan. 8 at a constituent event in Tucson.

It is not uncommon for patients with a similar injury to have trouble communicating or undergo personality changes, brain specialists say. Everything from ambition and concentration to short-term memory and social inhibitions can be affected, doctors say.

But relatives and friends who have been at Ms. Giffords’s side as she undergoes rehabilitation at a hospital in Houston said in interviews and e-mail exchanges that though her recovery was slow and exhausting, it was marked by significant progress.

Ms. Carusone said that on Sunday afternoon, Ms. Giffords’s husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, put the congresswoman on the phone to talk to his twin brother and fellow astronaut, Scott, who is aboard the International Space Station.

“She said, ‘Hi, I’m good,’ ” Ms. Carusone said.

With the help of therapists at TIRR Memorial Hermann in Houston, the congresswoman known for her active, outdoorsy ways now labors through the halls clutching a shopping cart and does squats and repetitive motions to build her muscles, her mother, Gloria, said in an enthusiastic e-mail she sent about a week ago to friends that recounted her daughter’s progress. Others who have visited Ms. Giffords recently have left similarly upbeat.

Aides conduct bedside briefings for her, telling her about the events unfolding in Egypt, for instance, and the decision by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, not to run for re-election next year.

“We tell her everything that’s going on,” Ms. Carusone said. “Don’t get the idea she’s speaking in paragraphs, but she definitely understands what we’re saying and she’s verbalizing.”

In long days that begin with breakfast at 7, Ms. Giffords, 40, has beaten one of her nurses at tic-tac-toe and transformed herself, her mother wrote, from “kind of a limp noodle” to someone who is “alert, sits up straight with good posture (in fact anyone in the room observing unconsciously sucks it up and throws back their shoulders) and is working very hard.”

Ms. Giffords’s mother says doctors are regularly surprised by her latest achievement. They say, “She did WHAT?” she wrote in her e-mail, adding that “Little Miss Overachiever is healing very fast.”

Reached by telephone on Sunday, the congresswoman’s mother offered a one-word assessment of her daughter’s road to recovery. “As far as Gabby’s progress, you can quote me as saying, ‘Yippee!’ ” she said.

The rehabilitation center referred requests for comment to Ms. Giffords’s staff.

Dr. David Langer, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Cushing Neuroscience Institutes at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., who is not treating Ms. Giffords, pointed to encouraging signs.

“She’s obviously communicating, obviously verbal,” he said. The gunshot wound, he said, “probably didn’t irreversibly damage her speech center.”

“Until she’s really talking, giving a speech,” Dr. Langer said, “you won’t know if there’s a subtle speech problem. But it sounds like with rehabilitation, with time, she ought to be very functional.”

The use of singing, he said, is a standard technique to help restore speech in people with brain injuries. (It is sometimes used to help treat stuttering, Dr. Langer said, citing the movie “The King’s Speech” in which King George VI sang to overcome his speech impediment.) The part of the brain that controls singing is not the same as the one that controls speech, though it is close.

Dr. Langer also said it was good news that Ms. Giffords was walking. “People’s ultimate endpoints are often based on how rapidly they improve,” he said. “If there’s rapid progress, the recovery potential is much higher. It sounds like she hasn’t plateaued yet and is improving really quickly.”

The specialized clinic that is helping Ms. Giffords recover has several gymnasiums equipped for people with spinal and brain injuries, as well as a swimming pool for therapy. The main hallway is lined with large photographs of former patients who have made spectacular recoveries, among them Kevin Everett, a former National Football League player who suffered a spinal injury.

There are plaques with the inspiring tales of the survivors next to the photos. One shows a man hunting ducks in a wheelchair, his shotgun up and a dog by his side. Another is a bride on her wedding day, who had suffered a traumatic brain injury two years before.

Therapists push patients in wheelchairs along the hallways. Some brain-injury patients who have had parts of their skulls removed, like Ms. Giffords, wear helmets to protect their brains. (In Ms. Giffords’s case, her mother said, doctors are planning to reinstall a section of her cranium at the end of the month, well ahead of schedule.)

Mockups of stairs, a kitchen and a washing machine help patients relearn basic skills. A therapist encouraged one patient to try moving his leg and was caught by an unexpected kick. She winced as she said, “Good, Jim!”

Ms. Giffords is receiving similar encouragement, by doting therapists and a network of friends, some of them from the political world.

Brad Holland, a Tucson lawyer and old friend, has been a regular presence at her bedside. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has spent the night in the congresswoman’s room in what Gloria Giffords called a “sleepover.”

A visit by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader, is planned soon, and the first President George Bush, who lives in Houston and visited with Captain Kelly recently, may stop by for a visit as well, those close to the congresswoman say.

Despite some obvious signs of progress for Ms. Giffords, experts offer some caution.

The human brain has what amounts to redundant circuits for some simple tasks, like walking, and it is possible for patients to make rapid progress on those skills and still have trouble with mental work and speaking, doctors said.

“There are backup systems in the brain for the more basic functions that have been around longer in human beings,” said Dr. Jonathan Fellus, the director of the Brain Injury Program at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey. “Conversely, for things such as language, which are uniquely human, it’s a highly specialized and delicate network that doesn’t get reconstructed so easily.”

But those close to Ms. Giffords remain optimistic that her recovery will be dramatic.

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, was at Ms. Giffords’s bedside in Tucson on Jan. 12 when she first opened her eyes. She was visiting Ms. Giffords again, in Houston, last Monday when she asked for toast with her oatmeal.

“It is an excellent development and a great indicator of the progress of her recovery,” she said.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz predicted that her friend would one day walk back into the House chamber.


Marc Lacey reported from Phoenix, and James C. McKinley Jr. from Houston. Denise Grady contributed reporting from New York.

    Word and Lyric, Giffords Labors to Speak Again, NYT, 13.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/us/14giffords.html

To Defend the Accused in a Tucson Rampage, First a Battle to Get Inside a Mind

February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN and MARC LACEY

TUCSON — Judy Clarke, the public defender for the man charged in the Tucson shooting, Jared L. Loughner, has made motions on his behalf and entered a plea for him of not guilty. But one of her most essential acts of lawyering came when she patted Mr. Loughner on the back in court last month, leaned in close and whispered in his ear.

For the small cadre of lawyers specializing in federal death penalty cases, getting the defendant to trust them, or just to grudgingly accept them, can be half the battle. That is especially true when mental illness is a factor, as it may be in the case of Mr. Loughner, a troubled young man accused of opening fire on a crowd on Jan. 8 in an attempt to kill Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

In her unassuming, almost motherly way, Ms. Clarke excels at getting close to people implicated in awful crimes. In jailhouse meetings that can stretch most of the day, she listens intently and grows to know her outcast clients in a way few ever have in their troubled lives, colleagues say.

Still, Ms. Clarke, who has made a name for herself representing notorious murderers and terrorists, sometimes falls short. One client threatened to kill her during his trial. More than one has tried to dump her midway through.

How Mr. Loughner and Ms. Clark get along, or fail to, will set the course for how the criminal case unfolds. One of Ms. Clarke’s biggest challenges may be persuading Mr. Loughner to allow her to raise questions about his mental health; that issue led to conflict between Ms. Clarke and some of her previous clients, like the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, and the Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui.

“It could go many different ways,” said Michael First, a psychiatrist who has worked on a case with Ms. Clarke. “He could be totally acknowledging he’s mentally ill, or he could be the Kaczynski and Moussaoui type and be absolutely adamant there is nothing wrong with him.”

Mr. Kaczynski severed ties with Ms. Clarke and the rest of his legal team when they pushed the idea of presenting his mental illness to the jury as a reason to spare his life. Once a mathematician, he was proud of his mind and found his lawyers’ suggestion offensive.

And Mr. Moussaoui, who faced the death penalty on charges that he helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks, opposed the efforts of his legal team, which Ms. Clarke was assisting, to portray him as mentally ill. Mr. First recalled spending hours outside Mr. Moussaoui’s cell, being rebuffed in his efforts to coax him into a conversation.

Next to nothing is known of what Mr. Loughner and Ms. Clarke have spoken about in the month since he was arrested. But it is unlikely, former colleagues of Ms. Clarke say, that she and her two co-counsels, Mark Fleming and Reuben C. Cahn, are very far along in planning his defense. It is possible, lawyers say, that they have not even broached the extent of Mr. Loughner’s mental illness or the shooting that left six dead and 13 wounded, among them Ms. Giffords, who is recovering in a rehabilitation center in Houston.

“That’s not something you jump into during the first or the fourth or even the 10th interview,” said Michael Burt, an experienced capital defender who worked with Ms. Clarke to defend Eric R. Rudolph, a serial bomber responsible for the fatal blast at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. “It takes a long time to get to that point.”

In the Loughner case, Ms. Clarke agreed with the prosecution’s request to move the court proceedings from Phoenix to Tucson, but she said she had questions about the facility where he would be held. Ms. Clarke last week temporarily prevented the United States Marshals Service from releasing new photographs of him.

In past cases, Ms. Clarke has used her initial meetings with defendants to improve their lot in the short term, by trying to get them less restrictive conditions in jail or relaying messages to family members.

“We didn’t talk about the death penalty or anything legal at first,” said Quin Denvir, Ms. Clarke’s co-counsel on the Unabomber case. “We spent a lot of time getting him out of the Sacramento County jail to the federal detention center, because it was quieter and he couldn’t stand how noisy the county jail was. That’s the kind of thing where we can help.”

Ms. Clarke, rather than focusing on her clients’ innocence, spends much of her defense work trying to persuade jurors to spare her clients’ lives. She does this by presenting what lawyers call a “mitigating social history” — a narrative of abuse, violence or mental illness that the defendant may have suffered. She sends investigators to find grade-school teachers, former girlfriends, classmates, anyone who can provide insight into what made her client go awry.

Ms. Clarke rarely gives interviews to the news media, but she did explain her philosophy last year in a law school publication at Washington and Lee University. “None of us, including those accused of crime, wants to be defined by the worst moment or worst day of our lives,” she said.

In representing Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother who killed her two boys, Ms. Clarke focused the jury’s attention on the facts that Ms. Smith’s father had committed suicide and that her stepfather had sexually abused her.

“She was able to change her from Susan the monster to Susan the victim,” said Tommy Pope, a South Carolina legislator who prosecuted the case against Ms. Smith. A jury spared her life.

Ms. Clarke helped Buford O. Furrow Jr., a white supremacist, avoid the death penalty even after he confessed to wounding five people by opening fire at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles and then shooting a postal worker in 1999. During the trial, it came to light that Mr. Furrow had threatened to kill Ms. Clarke and the rest of his defense team, but they remained on the case.

In the case of Roy C. Green, an inmate accused of fatally stabbing one guard and wounding four others in 1997, a judge agreed with Ms. Clarke that Mr. Green was mentally incompetent to stand trial even though the defendant agreed with prosecutors that he was fit. During a hearing, Ms. Clarke told the judge that Mr. Green had expressed fears that she and others were working against him, using it as evidence of his paranoid delusions.

In her court arguments, Ms. Clarke can be quite vehement, lawyers who have seen her at work say. Ms. Clarke once told The Los Angeles Times: “I like the antagonism. I like the adversarial nature of the business. I love all of that.”

But her demeanor changes to that of a social worker when meeting with her clients one on one.

“Even people who are quite mentally ill can identify someone who is real and who wants to protect them,” said David Bruck, a lawyer at Washington and Lee University’s School of Law who has worked with Ms. Clarke. “She’s a great listener, and she’s focused on the client. She tries to understand the client. The client becomes her world.”

    To Defend the Accused in a Tucson Rampage, First a Battle to Get Inside a Mind, NYT, 12.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/us/13tucson.html

Killing of Missionary Rattles Texas Border

February 6, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

PHARR, Tex. — Mexico has always had a reputation here as a place where things can go wrong in a hurry. But the fatal shooting of a Texas missionary across the border late last month has reinforced the widely held belief in this region that the country has become a lawless war zone.

The missionary, Nancy Davis, who had worked in Mexico for decades, was shot in the back of the head by gunmen in a pickup truck who had pursued her and her husband for miles in Tamaulipas State.

Her husband, Samuel Davis, piloted his bullet-ridden truck across the two-mile international bridge here, driving pell-mell against traffic on the wrong side of the bridge to evade the pursuers and reach an American hospital. He arrived on the United States side too late to save Ms. Davis, 59.

State Department officials say that 79 American citizens were murdered in Mexico in 2009, and that at least 60 were killed last year from January to November, though an official annual figure has yet to be compiled. The numbers have been rising since 2007, when 38 American citizens were murdered in Mexico, State Department records show.

In late September, an American man was shot to death while he and his wife were riding water scooters on the Mexican side of Falcon Lake. A month later, a student at the University of Texas, Brownsville, was taken off a passenger bus and killed by gunmen. Then in November, four men from San Marcos, Tex., along with a 14-year-old visitor from Chicago, disappeared in Nuevo Laredo and are presumed to have been abducted, the F.B.I. said.

The heaviest toll is in El Paso, where many residents cross the border regularly to conduct business or visit family.

In early November, for instance, four American citizens were killed in separate crimes over one weekend, including a 15-year-old boy. All of the victims were ambushed and shot to death while visiting Ciudad Juárez, which has become one of the most murderous cities in the world because of a battle between the Sinaloa cartel and the remnants of the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes gang.

“We know that many of our winter Texans enjoy traveling to Mexico, but they should understand that we cannot guarantee their safety after they cross the border,” Steven C. McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in a warning issued after Ms. Davis’s death.

Relatives described Ms. Davis as an ebullient and devout woman who loved working with people in rural Mexico. She was a registered nurse and had worked as a midwife in Mexico, in addition to teaching Bible classes. She also composed religious songs on the piano and sewed her own prairie-style dresses.

For decades, she and her husband had run a charity — the nondenominational Gospel Proclaimers Missionary Association in Weslaco, Tex. — that raised money to build churches, hold revivals and distribute Bibles in poor Mexican villages, mostly in the states bordering Texas.

About a year ago, Ms. Davis and her husband moved their base of operations from a small Mexican town in Nuevo León State to their house in Monte Alto, Tex., where they had raised their two grown sons. They had also curtailed their trips to Mexico in recent months after having some close scrapes involving highway robbers, said Melody Reynolds, a niece of Mr. Davis’s.

But last week the couple had received a message from the pastor of one of the churches they had established during their 30 years of missionary work, Ms. Reynolds said.

The pastor said the church was in financial trouble and needed cash. The couple generally drove an older model car while in Mexico to avoid attracting carjackers, but that vehicle was in the shop, so they took their 2008 Chevrolet pickup truck. The police in Pharr say they think that choice made them a target.

The trip took three days, and the couple were on their way home when a group of men brandishing guns began tailing them, Ms. Reynolds said.

They were just outside San Fernando, 87 miles south of the border. It is a region that has been plagued over the last year by battles between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas.

Mr. Davis decided to run for it, but the truck behind him caught up. Several miles later, two other trucks tried to block the road, but Mr. Davis managed to get past them, Ms. Reynolds said.

The Pharr police chief, Ruben Villescos, said the motive for the attack remained a mystery. He said the men in the three trucks followed Mr. Davis for miles and boxed in his pickup to force him off the road. Several shots were fired, and Ms. Davis was hit in the back of the head.

One slug went through the passenger side window and through the windshield near Mr. Davis, Ms. Reynolds said.

“He says to this day he doesn’t know why he’s alive,” she said. “He got shot at. Apparently it wasn’t his time to go.”

    Killing of Missionary Rattles Texas Border, NYT, 6.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/us/07border.html

A Struggle to Disarm People Without Gun Rights

February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By ED CONNOLLY and MICHAEL LUO

By law, Roy Perez should not have had a gun three years ago when he shot his mother 16 times in their home in Baldwin Park, Calif., killing her, and then went next door and killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter.

Mr. Perez, who pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and was sentenced last year to life in prison, had a history of mental health issues. As a result, even though in 2004 he legally bought the 9-millimeter Glock 26 handgun he used, at the time of the shootings his name was in a statewide law enforcement database as someone whose gun should be taken away, according to the authorities.

The case highlights a serious vulnerability when it comes to keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and others, not just in California but across the country.

In the wake of the Tucson shootings, much attention has been paid to various categories of people who are legally barred from buying handguns — those who have been “adjudicated as a mental defective,” have felony convictions, have committed domestic violence misdemeanors and so on. The focus has almost entirely been on gaps in the federal background check system that is supposed to deny guns to these prohibited buyers.

There is, however, another major blind spot in the system.

Tens of thousands of gun owners, like Mr. Perez, bought their weapons legally but under the law should no longer have them because of subsequent mental health or criminal issues. In Mr. Perez’s case, he had been held involuntarily by the authorities several times for psychiatric evaluation, which in California bars a person from possessing a gun for five years.

Policing these prohibitions is difficult, however, in most states. The authorities usually have to stumble upon the weapon in, say, a traffic stop or some other encounter, and run the person’s name through various record checks.

California is unique in the country, gun control advocates say, because of its computerized database, the Armed Prohibited Persons System. It was created, in part, to enable law enforcement officials to handle the issue pre-emptively, actively identifying people who legally bought handguns, or registered assault weapons, but are now prohibited from having them.

The list had 18,374 names on it as of the beginning of this month — 15 to 20 are added a day — swamping law enforcement’s ability to keep up. Some police departments admitted that they had not even tried.

The people currently in the database are believed to be in possession of 34,101 handguns and 1,590 assault weapons, said Steven Lindley, acting chief of the firearms bureau in the state’s Department of Justice. He estimated that 30 percent to 35 percent of the people on the list were there for mental health reasons.

Despite the enforcement challenges, the state’s database offers a window into how extensive the problem is likely to be across the country. Concrete figures on the scope of the issue are difficult to come by because no other state matches gun purchase records after the fact with criminal and mental health files as California does.

“There are 18,000 people on California’s list,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who helped law enforcement officials set up the system and is working on a proposal to evaluate its effectiveness. “So we can roughly extrapolate there are 180,000 such people across the country, just based on differences across populations.”

By way of context, Dr. Wintemute said that in 2009 only about 150,000 people were prevented from buying a gun because they failed background checks, out of about 10.8 million who applied.

Only a handful of states, however, even have the ability to keep track of handgun purchases the way California does, by either requiring a license or permit to own one or simply keeping records of such purchases. Even fewer require a license or permit for other types of firearms.

California’s system came about through a 2002 law that was even supported by the National Rifle Association, in part because it was billed as a way to protect members of law enforcement. It finally got under way in earnest in 2007. But though gun control advocates consider it a model, it still has serious gaps.

The system relies on records kept by the state on handgun purchases, but the state does not retain records of most rifle and shotgun purchases. There were 255,504 long guns sold in California in 2009 alone, compared with 228,368 handguns, according to state figures.

Perhaps most important, the burden for confiscating weapons falls largely on local jurisdictions, most of which are too short on resources to do much. Some may also have been only dimly aware of how the list works.

Police departments and sheriff’s offices that request access to the list of barred owners can log in to a secure account on the state Justice Department’s Web site and get monthly updates of who is on the list in their jurisdictions, with newly added names flagged. The Justice Department also trained more than 1,300 law enforcement officers around the state on the system in 2007 and plans another round this year.

It appears, however, that in the case of Mr. Perez, the Baldwin Park police were not checking the list at all in 2008, when the shootings occurred, in part because of confusion over how to access the database.

“Nobody knew where the e-mail was or where it was going,” said Lt. Joseph Cowan, head of detectives for the Baldwin Park Police Department.

Even today, Lieutenant Cowan acknowledged, his department rarely looks at the list, and he initially said he had no idea how many people in the city were on it. (He later checked and discovered there were about 35 people in his 6.6-square-mile district.)

“We try to get on,” he said. “But with staffing levels what they are, it’s difficult.”

A total of 37 police departments and three county sheriff’s offices in the state have not even signed up to get access to the database, despite receiving yearly notices, said Mr. Lindley, of the firearms bureau.

After being contacted by a reporter, two police departments — in East Palo Alto and Redwood City — said they had not subscribed to the database but would now do so, professing some confusion about the way the system functioned.

Capt. Chris Cesena of the Redwood City Police Department said he had been under the impression that state officials would call if anyone in Redwood City showed up on the list. Only after the department signed up recently did it discover there were 29 people in the city on the list, including seven for mental health reasons.

Detective Vic Brown, a supervisor in the Los Angeles Police Department gun unit, coordinates operations to disarm the roughly 2,700 city residents on the list.

“We just don’t have enough manpower to pursue every one of these cases,” he said. “These cases go on there quicker than we can get to them.”

It is no small task to conduct the necessary background work and knock on someone’s door, Detective Brown said. A case that seems relatively low-risk will usually involve four officers. If it is considered more dangerous, it might take eight. The priority, he said, is on people newly added to the system, because they are more likely to be at the address listed.

The state Justice Department’s firearms bureau does have a small unit, with 20 agents, that tracks down people on the list. Last year, it investigated 1,717 people and seized 1,224 firearms.

The list is growing far faster, however, than names are being removed. “We’re just not a very big bureau,” Mr. Lindley said. “We do the best we can with the personnel that we have.”

The bureau is planning a sweep this spring focused on people on the list for mental health reasons. Last summer, a man from the Fresno area who had recently been released from a mental health facility was found to possess 73 guns, including 17 unregistered assault rifles.

In the case of Mr. Perez, Lieutenant Cowan, of Baldwin Park, said he learned that state agents had been scheduled to visit Mr. Perez to confiscate his weapon — two weeks after the rampage took place.

    A Struggle to Disarm People Without Gun Rights, NYT, 5.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/us/06guns.html

Bit by Bit, a City’s Attention Returns to Mundane Matters

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and CARLI BROUSSEAU

TUCSON — The talk around town this week has been about the weather.

The high made it only into the upper 30s on Thursday, largely relegating the shorts and flip-flops of last week to indoors — at least until Sunday, when the temperature is expected to climb back up to the accustomed 72-degree range.

And basketball, too, has crept into conversations. At the McKale Memorial Center, where on Jan. 12 President Obama urged the country to do better, crowds wearing red and blue have been unself-consciously cheering a University of Arizona team ranked in the Top 25 for the first time since 2007.

Tucson, synonymous a month ago with a deadly shooting rampage at a political event, is beginning to move on.

Representative Gabrielle Giffords, struck by a bullet in the head on Jan. 8, spent two weeks at Tucson’s University Medical Center but is now in a rehabilitation program in Houston.

Jared L. Loughner, 22, the man accused of shooting Ms. Giffords and 18 others — including six who died — is in federal custody in Phoenix, two hours to the north.

For the city, the pain has lingered but diminished.

“I was depressed for 10 days after it happened, but eventually it lifted,” said Hector Lovemore, 70, a retired mining executive. “It felt like a kick in the gut.”

But despite Tucson’s having become the center of a national conversation about civility, politics and gun violence, Mr. Lovemore said his love for his adopted hometown had not changed. “I expect, in a year from now, this will be in the background,” he said. “It’s time to move on.”

Toward that end, on Friday the city will dismantle three makeshift memorials to the victims and collect the hundreds of tiny American flags, candles, bouquets of flowers, photographs and tiles with handwritten notes people have left behind. The items will be saved until decisions are made about a permanent memorial.

A sign at the largest of the three, at University Medical Center, asks people to stop leaving mementos, and instead to donate to their favorite charity.

“We’re trying to transition out from these temporary memorial sites to starting to understand what the expectations for a permanent memorial are,” said Stephen Brigham, the hospital’s director of capital planning and projects. “We at least have the start of a community process.”

The memorial at the site of the shooting, the parking lot of a Safeway supermarket on North Oracle Road, will also be boxed up. Business there does not appear to have fallen off, and shoppers said it did not feel strange to be buying peanut butter and milk near what had recently been a bloody crime scene.

“I think it pretty much could have happened anywhere, so the place doesn’t seem to matter,” said Charles Cusack, 67, an aviation consultant.

At the Loughner family home, Mr. Loughner’s parents, who neighbors say have never been particularly social, have begun to venture out. The family has released a note expressing shock and regret about the shootings, but has not spoken about their son in public.

Mr. Loughner’s father, Randy, sits for long stretches in the dark inside his old white pickup truck. His mother, Amy, has not returned to work at the Parks Department.

People drive slowly by the house, partly hidden by a cactus garden, to gawk. A mesquite tree drips sap onto the driveway.

George Gayan, who lives next door, said that he had seen Mr. Loughner a couple of times since the shooting, but that they did not speak. That is as it should be, though, Mr. Gayan said, given that the two have not spoken in some 25 years.

Perhaps the most comforting sign of normalcy for the city’s residents has been the return of the Tucson Gem, Fossil and Mineral Shows. The event, now in its 57th year, is one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions and hotel room rates that had been less than $100 a night now hover around $200.

Rock and fossil dealers from all over the Southwest have pitched tents and set up a hodgepodge of tables around the city displaying large crystals, dinosaur bones and jewelry for sale.

Even though Tucson is returning to normal, residents say that memories of the shootings and the continuing recovery have had a galvanizing effect on their town.

“I think it’s really brought Tucson closer,” said Sharon Algar, 73, a retired nurse. “I live at a senior center, and it really takes something to get some of those people there talking to each other. This did it. We just keep praying and praying.”


Joseph Goldstein contributed reporting.

    Bit by Bit, a City’s Attention Returns to Mundane Matters, NYT, 3.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04arizona.html

For Tucson Survivors, Health Care Cost Is Concern

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY and SAM DOLNICK

TUCSON — Seconds after gunfire erupted outside a supermarket here last month, Randy Gardner, one of those struck during the barrage, said another looming crisis immediately entered his mind.

“I wondered, ‘How much is this going to cost me?’ ” he said. “It was a thought that went through my head right away.”

Tucson’s medical system quickly swung into action after the shootings, with ambulances and medical helicopters rushing victims to hospitals where trauma specialists awaited them. The life-saving treatment the victims received over the ensuing days carried a heavy cost though, and the bills — the costliest of which may be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for Representative Gabrielle Giffords — are still being tallied.

But despite the fears of some victims, it does not appear that the shooting will ruin anybody financially. Interviews with victims as well as advocates assisting them suggest that most, if not all, of the 13 people wounded that morning had health insurance, and health care providers say they expect insurance companies to cover the bulk of the medical costs.

On top of that, the fact that federal charges have been filed against Jared L. Loughner in the shootings means that state victim-compensation money will be supplemented by federal help. Private charitable efforts to aid victims have also been created.

Ms. Giffords, who received a bullet wound to the head and was the most gravely injured of those who survived the shooting, also had probably the best insurance, a Congressional plan known for its comprehensive coverage that was held out as a model during last year’s debate over the health care overhaul.

Dr. Peter Rhee, chief trauma surgeon at Tucson’s University Medical Center, has repeatedly said that Ms. Giffords received the same care there as any other gunshot victim. “We don’t have time or luxury to ask for insurance cards or to know if they are a good guy or how they are going to pay,” he said. “We deal with whoever comes in the door. We don’t know if they are immigrants, if they are legal, illegal. We just treat them.”

Still, some of those who are following Ms. Giffords’s treatment, including her speedy transfer from Tucson to a top rehabilitation facility in Houston, can only wish their health plans were as responsive.

Monique Pomerleau, a mother of three from Northern California, suffered a traumatic brain injury in a traffic accident last February but has not yet undergone rehabilitation because her insurer, Health Net of California, said it lacked such services within the network.. Her family has hired a lawyer to press the matter and recently received word that a 30-day rehabilitation program had been approved. A spokesman for the insurer said federal privacy laws prevented it from commenting on individual patient’s cases.

“We watched the congresswoman’s care and we thought, How marvelous, but there are real people out there like Monique who don’t get the same possibilities,” said Lisa Kantor, a lawyer who specializes in challenging insurance companies and was hired by Ms. Pomerleau’s father, Tom.

After a tragedy like the Tucson shooting, billing is a topic that appears almost unseemly to raise. But with health costs spiraling, it is one that was on the minds of some victims, not to mention their care providers.

“We have to recover our costs so that we can provide the service to others,” said Craig Yale, vice president of corporate development for the Colorado-based Air Methods Corporation, which operates LifeNet helicopter service in Tucson, one of three private helicopter operators that were called to the shooting scene.

At University Medical Center, where the most seriously injured victims were treated, Misty Hansen, the hospital’s chief financial officer, said she did not anticipate any problems recovering costs. “It is my expectation that the bills will be paid and the hospital will be appropriately compensated,” she said.

Declining to discuss the case of individual patients, Ms. Hansen said 5 percent of patients were “self pay,” which means they lack insurance and are billed personally.

Even those like Mr. Gardner, who lost a solid health insurance plan when he retired five years ago and now has a deductible in the $10,000 range, will most likely benefit from the plethora of special public and private victim funds to fill gaps in his coverage.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s victim assistant fund cannot be used directly for medical care. But the money was used after the Tucson shooting to replace the eyeglasses of two injured victims and to fly relatives of victims to Tucson and the remains of one victim to her home state, said Kathryn Turman, director of the F.B.I.’s office for victim assistance.

The Safeway supermarket where Mr. Loughner is accused of spraying the crowd with bullets has begun a fund to aid victims, although company officials have not yet detailed how the money will be spent. A nonprofit victims rights group based in Tucson, Homicide Survivors, is similarly raising money on behalf of victims.

“My fund is too small to cover their medical bills,” said Carol Gaxiola, who is director of the survivors group. “But we’ll be able to pitch in to cover other costs.”

Besides the ambulance bill ($991.80 and $16.96 a mile for ground transport) and the hospital expenses, victims could face travel costs if they wish to follow the federal court proceedings against Mr. Loughner, especially if the trial is moved out of state.

There are also the costs of funeral expenses for the six people who died, as well as trauma counselors and loss of wages for the injured.

Mary Reed, who was shot three times that morning, said her insurer, through her husband’s job at the University of Arizona, had been unusually responsive and accommodating since the shooting, approving medicines and services in 24 hours, significantly faster than usual.

One concern she has, though, is whether her 17-year-old daughter, who was at the scene but was not hit — Ms. Reed threw herself on her daughter to protect her — will qualify as a victim. Her husband and son were there as well, and they ran for cover. They are undergoing counseling, but Ms. Reed is uncertain who will pick up their costs.

Kenneth Dorushka, 63, was struck in the arm by a bullet and is still awaiting word on how much of his costs will be covered by his insurer, United Healthcare. “It’s hard to tell because we haven’t gotten any bills yet, so you don’t know how much they’re going to cover or not,” said Mr. Dorushka, adding that he had spent about $100 so far on co-payments and other medical costs.

Ron Barber, district director for Ms. Giffords’s Congressional office who was hit twice in the shooting, said he expected to emerge from the shooting without any financial cost.

“I was thinking at first about what kind of deductible I’d have to pay, but then I learned that workers compensation will cover everything,” said Mr. Barber, who was working when he was shot.

Even as he recovers at home, Mr. Barber said he was trying to ensure that the shooting does not cause undo financial strain on those affected.

“It’s obvious that those of us who were shot are victims, but there are others,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who didn’t have medical coverage, but I’m interested in making sure no one continues to suffer from this.”


Reporting was contributed by Timothy Williams, Jennifer Medina, Ford Burkhart and Joseph Goldstein.

    For Tucson Survivors, Health Care Cost Is Concern, NYT, 3.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04tucson.html

President Is Likely

to Discuss Gun Control Soon

January 28, 2011
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — Administration officials say that President Obama, largely silent about gun control since the Tucson shooting carnage, will address the issue soon, potentially reopening a long-dormant debate on one of the nation’s most politically volatile issues.

The officials did not indicate what measures, if any, Mr. Obama might support; with Republicans in control of the House and many Democrats fearful of the gun lobby’s power, any legislation faces long odds for passage. Among the skeptics is the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada.

Still, Mr. Obama has come under increased pressure to speak out from gun-control advocates, including urban Democrats in Congress and liberal activists and editorial writers. They would like him to at least support a bill that would restore an expired federal ban on the sort of high-capacity ammunition magazine that was used in the Jan. 8 shootings in Tucson that killed six people and injured 13, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona.

The advocates, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, were critical after Mr. Obama did not propose any measures in his State of the Union address Tuesday night to address gun violence. In interviews since, senior White House advisers have said without specifics that Mr. Obama would address the issue in coming weeks, though just how has not been decided.

“I wouldn’t rule out that at some point the president talks about the issues surrounding gun violence,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday. “I don’t have a timetable or, obviously, what he would say.”

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, separately told reporters that Mr. Obama would “no doubt” speak out before long.

Mr. Bloomberg, who is co-chairman of a group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said in his weekly radio address on Friday that he was newly “encouraged” because “some of the president’s staff said that he was planning a speech on the problem and on guns and what he would do, and I think that’s great if he does that.”

When several White House aides were asked about that comment, each referred to Mr. Gibbs’s earlier comment.

Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a Democrat of New York who has introduced legislation to ban magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, said she was hopeful that Mr. Obama would now respond to “the pressure that’s been coming out from all the different groups and almost every paper I know of.”

Such a ban was part of a broader law banning many assault weapons that was enacted in 1994 by a Democratic-controlled Congress and allowed to expire 10 years later when Republicans were in control. Many Democrats have shied from gun legislation ever since 1994, blaming the loss of their House and Senate majorities that year partly on the assault weapons ban, which enraged the gun lobby, in particular the National Rifle Association.

Ms. McCarthy, who won election in 1996 as a gun-control crusader, three years after her husband was killed and her son injured by a man who opened fire on passengers on a Long Island commuter train, said, “I don’t see how anybody could get the assault weapons ban passed in this kind of climate with the N.R.A.”

But a ban on high-capacity magazines is possible, she said, adding, “If I didn’t think I could pass something, I wouldn’t push as hard as I’ve been pushing.”

Mr. Obama supported gun-control legislation as a state senator in Illinois, and as a presidential candidate he opposed laws allowing concealed weapons and endorsed those requiring tougher background checks of gun buyers and a permanent assault weapons ban. But as president he has been a big disappointment to gun-control groups.

A year ago, one of the main groups, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, gave him an “F” for his first year in office. Its report cited, among other things, his signing of a law permitting people to carry concealed weapons in national parks and in checked luggage on Amtrak trains, and his failure to name a director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“Not only did he not champion the cause, he actually signed bad legislation into law,” said Dennis A. Henigan, vice president of the Brady Campaign.

Mr. Obama recently nominated Andrew Traver, chief of the firearms bureau’s Chicago office, as director of the agency. Mr. Traver immediately drew N.R.A. opposition, throwing his Senate confirmation into jeopardy. And the administration recently proposed rules to require gun sellers in states bordering Mexico to report multiple sales of rifles and shotguns, to stem gun trafficking to Mexican drug cartels.

Mr. Henigan called those actions “encouraging signs.” He added, “The White House has certainly been sending signals that it realizes that it can’t go forward avoiding the word ‘gun,’ which is basically what it did for two years.”

    President Is Likely to Discuss Gun Control Soon, NYT, 28.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/us/politics/29obama.html

Utah’s Gun Appreciation Day

January 26, 2011
The New York Times
By GAIL COLLINS

This week in Washington, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced three very modest gun regulation bills, including one making it more difficult to sell guns to people on the terror watch list.

Meanwhile, in Salt Lake City, the State Legislature is considering a bill to honor the Browning M1911 pistol by making it the official state firearm.

Guess which idea has the better chance of passage? Can I see a show of hands? Oh, you cynics, you!

Yes, a committee in the Utah House of Representatives voted 9 to 2 this week to approve a bill that would add the Browning pistol to the pantheon of official state things, along with the bird (seagull), rock (coal) and dance (square). Also, although it really has nothing to do with this discussion, I have to mention that the Utah Legislature has provided its citizens with an official state cooking pot, and it is the Dutch oven.

“This firearm is Utah,” Representative Carl Wimmer, the Browning bill’s sponsor, told The Salt Lake Tribune. He is an energetic-looking guy with a huge forehead who has only been in office four years yet has, according to one of his videos, “sponsored and passed some of the most significant pieces of legislation in Utah history.”

Capitol observers say the Browning bill has an excellent chance of becoming law. Meanwhile, Lautenberg will be lucky to get a hearing. The terror of the National Rifle Association is so pervasive that President Obama did not want to poison the mood of his State of the Union address by suggesting that when somebody on the terror watch list tries to buy a gun, maybe we should do an extra check.

“But people are now commenting on the fact that the president didn’t talk about it in his speech. That hasn’t happened for years,” said Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, whose job really does require an inordinate amount of optimism.

Lautenberg’s bills are extremely mild, and no one seems eager to argue in public against the one that would end easy access to 30-bullet magazines that allow someone with a semiautomatic pistol to mow down a parking lot full of people in a matter of seconds. Instead, they just refuse to come to the phone or toss out platitudes.

“The people that are going to commit a crime or are going to do something crazy aren’t going to pay attention to the laws in the first place. Let’s fix the real problem. Here’s a mentally deranged person who had access to a gun that should not have had access to a gun,” said Senator Tom Coburn on “Meet the Press.”

Another of Lautenberg’s bills would tighten a loophole in current law so a mentally deranged person who should not have access to guns could not go to a gun show and buy one without the regular security check. But never mind.

On Monday, the Utah State Capitol celebrated Browning Day, honoring John Moses Browning, native son and maker of the nominee for Official State Firearm. There were speeches, a proclamation, a flyover by a National Guard helicopter, and, of course, a rotunda full of guns. “We recognize his efforts to preserve the Constitution,” Gov. Gary Herbert said, in keeping with what appears to be a new Republican regulation requiring all party members to mention the Constitution at least once in every three sentences.

It is generally not a good policy to dwell on the strange behavior of state legislators since it leads to bottomless despair. If I wanted to go down that road, I’d give you Mark Madsen, a Utah state senator who tried to improve upon the Browning Day celebrations by suggesting they be scheduled to coincide with Martin Luther King Day since “both made tremendous contributions to individual freedom and individual liberty.”

But it’s a symptom of a new streak of craziness abroad in the land, which has politicians scrambling to prove not just that they are against gun regulation, but also that they are proactively in favor of introducing guns into every conceivable part of American life. National parks. Schools. Bars. Airports.

“There is abundant research suggesting in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate, goes down,” Utah’s new United States senator, Mike Lee, told CNN.

Actually, there’s a ton of debate about this, which is hard to resolve given the fact that, as Michael Luo reported in The Times, the N.R.A.’s crack lobbyists have managed to stop almost all federal financing for scientific research on gun-related questions. But Lee has definitely made the list of most creative commentators on these matters, ever since he dismissed calls for a calmer political rhetoric after the Tucson massacre by arguing that “the shooter wins if we, who’ve been elected, change what we do just because of what he did.”

Feel free to say whatever you like about the senator’s thinking. Be frank. Otherwise, the shooter wins.

    Utah’s Gun Appreciation Day, NYT, 26.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opinion/27collins.html

N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say

January 25, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

In the wake of the shootings in Tucson, the familiar questions inevitably resurfaced: Are communities where more people carry guns safer or less safe? Does the availability of high-capacity magazines increase deaths? Do more rigorous background checks make a difference?

The reality is that even these and other basic questions cannot be fully answered, because not enough research has been done. And there is a reason for that. Scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research say the influence of the National Rife Association has all but choked off money for such work.

“We’ve been stopped from answering the basic questions,” said Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was for about a decade the leading source of financing for firearms research.

Chris Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, said his group had not tried to squelch genuine scientific inquiries, just politically slanted ones.

“Our concern is not with legitimate medical science,” Mr. Cox said. “Our concern is they were promoting the idea that gun ownership was a disease that needed to be eradicated.”

The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, researchers say.

The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. The injury center was guilty of “putting out papers that were really political opinion masquerading as medical science,” said Mr. Cox, who also worked on this issue for the N.R.A. more than a decade ago.

Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to eliminate the injury center completely, arguing that its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before.

“It’s really simple with me,” Mr. Dickey, 71 and now retired, said in a telephone interview. “We have the right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms that we have.”

The Senate later restored the money but designated it for research on traumatic brain injury. Language was also inserted into the centers’ appropriations bill that remains in place today: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

The prohibition is striking, firearms researchers say, because there are already regulations that bar the use of C.D.C. money for lobbying for or against legislation. No other field of inquiry is singled out in this way.

In the end, researchers said, even though it is murky what exactly is allowed under this provision and what is not, the upshot is clear inside the centers: the agency should tread in this area only at its own peril.

“They had a near-death experience,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, whose study on the risks versus the benefits of having guns in the home became a focal point of attack by the N.R.A.

In the years since, the C.D.C. has been exceedingly wary of financing research focused on firearms. In its annual requests for proposals, for example, firearms research has been notably absent. Gail Hayes, spokeswoman for the centers, confirmed that since 1996, while the agency has issued requests for proposals that include the study of violence, which may include gun violence, it had not sent out any specifically on firearms.

“For policy to be effective, it needs to be based on evidence,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who had his C.D.C. financing cut in 1996. “The National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress have largely succeeded in choking off the development of evidence upon which that policy could be based.”

Private foundations initially stepped into the breach, but their attention tends to wax and wane, researchers said. They are also much more interested in work that leads to immediate results and less willing to finance basic epidemiological research that scientists say is necessary to establishing a foundation of knowledge about the connection between guns and violence, or the lack thereof.

The National Institute of Justice, part of the Justice Department, also used to finance firearms research, researchers said, but that money has also petered out in recent years. (Institute officials said they hoped to reinvigorate financing in this area.)

Stephen Teret, founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, estimated that the amount of money available for firearms research was a quarter of what it used to be. With so much uncertainty about financing, Mr. Teret said, the circle of academics who study the phenomenon has fallen off significantly.

After the centers’ clash with the N.R.A., Mr. Teret said he was asked by C.D.C. officials to “curtail some things I was saying about guns and gun policy.”

Mr. Teret objected, saying his public comments about gun policy did not come while he was on the “C.D.C. meter.” After he threatened to file a lawsuit against the agency, Mr. Teret said, the officials backed down and gave him “a little bit more leeway.”

C.D.C. financing for research on gun violence has not stopped completely, but it is now mostly limited to work in which firearms are only a component.

The centers also ask researchers it finances to give it a heads-up anytime they are publishing studies that have anything to do with firearms. The agency, in turn, relays this information to the N.R.A. as a courtesy, said Thomas Skinner, a spokesman for the centers.

Invariably, researchers said, whenever their work touches upon firearms, the C.D.C. becomes squeamish. In the end, they said, it is often simply easier to avoid the topic if they want to continue to be in the agency’s good graces.

Dr. Stephen Hargarten, professor and chairman of emergency medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, used to direct a research center, financed by the C.D.C., that focused on gun violence, but he said he had now shifted his attention to other issues.

    N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say, NYT, 25.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26guns.html

Remarks That Touch Not Just One City

January 26, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

TUCSON — The shooting rampage here drew an early mention in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, with President Obama saying, “Tucson reminded us that no matter who we are or where we come from, each of us is a part of something greater — something more consequential than party or political preference.”

Mr. Obama went on to say that “the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled.”

All over Tucson, people were listening to the president’s words, and they seemed to appreciate that they had hardly been forgotten in the wake of the Jan. 8 shooting.

In the cafeteria of University Medical Center, where many of the wounded were treated, late-shift workers sat around a tiny television, some of them misty-eyed as Mr. Obama mentioned the shooting.

At the Safeway supermarket where the shooting took place as Representative Gabrielle Giffords held a meet-and-greet event, about half a dozen people stared somberly at flowers and other offerings left at the entrance by well-wishers. “In the last couple weeks, we’ve been coming closer together in Tucson,” said Rosemary Barajas, 27.

Inside the Safeway, which was closed for more than a week after the shooting, Charles Levine, a pharmacist, listened to the president’s words on the radio as he shuffled through papers. Mr. Levine had been in the store when the bullets rang out and had seen all of the commotion that day. “He’s saying it,” Mr. Levine said approvingly.

Ron Barber, an aide to Ms. Giffords who was injured in the shooting and who watched the address from bed, said, “There’s so many people who responded heroically and who saved lives that morning, and it’s wonderful that they were acknowledged.”

Mr. Barber, who was standing near Ms. Giffords when the shooting began and suffered two bullet wounds, was particularly pleased that Tracy Culbert, the nurse who treated Ms. Giffords, was invited to the speech. Ms. Culbert had been his nurse, too. “She was outstanding,” he said.


Joseph Goldstein contributed reporting from Tucson.

    Remarks That Touch Not Just One City, NYT, 26.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26tucson.html

A Fighting Spirit Won’t Save Your Life

January 24, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD P. SLOAN

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS’S remarkable recovery from a bullet to her head has provided a heartening respite from a national calamity. Representative Giffords’s husband describes her as a “fighter,” and no doubt she is one. Whether her recovery has anything to do with a fighting spirit, however, is another matter entirely.

The idea that an individual has power over his health has a long history in American popular culture. The “mind cure” movements of the 1800s were based on the premise that we can control our well-being. In the middle of that century, Phineas Quimby, a philosopher and healer, popularized the view that illness was the product of mistaken beliefs, that it was possible to cure yourself by correcting your thoughts. Fifty years later, the New Thought movement, which the psychologist and philosopher William James called “the religion of the healthy minded,” expressed a very similar view: by focusing on positive thoughts and avoiding negative ones, people could banish illness.

The idea that people can control their own health has persisted through Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking,” in 1952, to a popular book today, “The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne, which teaches that to achieve good health all we have to do is to direct our requests to the universe.

It’s true that in some respects we do have control over our health. By exercising, eating nutritious foods and not smoking, we reduce our risk of heart disease and cancer. But the belief that a fighting spirit helps us to recover from injury or illness goes beyond healthful behavior. It reflects the persistent view that personality or a way of thinking can raise or reduce the likelihood of illness.

The psychosomatic hypothesis, which was popular in the mid-20th century, held that repressed emotional conflict was at the core of many physical diseases: Hypertension was the product of the inability to deal with hostile impulses. Ulcers were caused by unresolved fear and resentment. And women with breast cancer were characterized as being sexually inhibited, masochistic and unable to deal with anger.

Although modern doctors have rejected those beliefs, in the past 20 years, the medical literature has increasingly included studies examining the possibility that positive characteristics like optimism, spirituality and being a compassionate person are associated with good health. And books on the health benefits of happiness and positive outlook continue to be best sellers.

But there’s no evidence to back up the idea that an upbeat attitude can prevent any illness or help someone recover from one more readily. On the contrary, a recently completed study of nearly 60,000 people in Finland and Sweden who were followed for almost 30 years found no significant association between personality traits and the likelihood of developing or surviving cancer. Cancer doesn’t care if we’re good or bad, virtuous or vicious, compassionate or inconsiderate. Neither does heart disease or AIDS or any other illness or injury.

And while we may be able to point anecdotally to a Gabrielle Giffords as an example of how a fighting spirit improves medical outcome, other people with a spirit just as strong die — think of Elizabeth Edwards, for example. And many patients who employ negative thinking nevertheless recover from illness every day. We want good things to happen to good people and this desire blinds us to evidence to the contrary.

But such beliefs have implications for how we regard people who are ill. If people are insufficiently upbeat after a cancer diagnosis or inadequately “spiritual” after a diagnosis of AIDS, are we to assume they have willfully placed their health at risk? And if they fail to recover, is it really their fault? The incessant pressure to be positive imposes an enormous burden on patients whose course of treatment doesn’t go as planned.

Very early in my career, I participated in a study of young women who were hospitalized and awaiting the results of biopsies to determine if they had cervical cancer. While I was interviewing one of my patients, the biopsy results of the woman in the next bed came back to her — negative. The fortunate woman’s father, who was there with her, said in relief: “We’re good people. We deserve this.” It was a perfectly understandable response, but what should my patient have said to herself when her biopsy came back positive? That she got cancer because she wasn’t a good person?

It is difficult enough to be injured or gravely ill. To add to this the burden of guilt over a supposed failure to have the right attitude toward one’s illness is unconscionable. Linking health to personal virtue and vice not only is bad science, it’s bad medicine.

Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, is the author of “Blind Faith.”

    A Fighting Spirit Won’t Save Your Life, NYT, 24.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25sloan.html

Tucson Suspect Pleads Not Guilty

January 24, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — Jared L. Loughner, who the police said was responsible for the shooting rampage outside a Tucson supermarket on Jan. 8, pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges that he tried to murder Representative Gabrielle Giffords and two of her aides.

Appearing in Federal District Court alongside his defense lawyer, Judy Clarke, Mr. Loughner entered a written plea to Judge Larry A. Burns of San Diego without uttering a word.

Dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and wearing glasses, Mr. Loughner, 22, smiled through most of the proceedings and chuckled when a clerk read out the name of the case: the United States of America v. Jared Lee Loughner.

Ms. Clarke offered no objection to a request by Wallace Kleindienst, an assistant United States attorney, to move the court proceedings to Tucson. But Mr. Kleindienst, who is considered an expert in murder cases, indicated that Ms. Clarke would have additional opportunities to push for the trial to be held elsewhere.

The indictment unsealed against Mr. Loughner was preliminary, prosecutors have said, and did not involve any of the other shooting victims. A superseding indictment is expected to be filed after more investigation.

During the arraignment, which was conducted under high security, Judge Burns asked Ms. Clarke whether she had any concerns about her client’s ability to understand the case against him. “We are not raising any issues at this time,” she said.

The prosecution on Monday turned over to Ms. Clarke records from Mr. Loughner’s computer and transcripts of 250 witness interviews.

The shooting, which left six dead and 13 wounded, is expected to be addressed during President Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday, as several people who helped the wounded have been invited to attend.

Daniel Hernandez, the intern who gave first aid to Ms. Giffords after she was shot and who was called a hero by Mr. Obama during his speech in Tucson on Jan. 12, will attend, along with Peter Rhee, G. Michael Lemole Jr. and Randall S. Friese, all doctors who treated her at University Medical Center, said C. J. Karamargin, Ms. Giffords’s spokesman.

Also expected to be in attendance is Tracy Culbert, a trauma and intensive care nurse who treated Ms. Giffords. On Friday, Ms. Culbert accompanied Ms. Giffords on her flight to Houston, where her recovery is continuing in an intensive care unit at Memorial Hermann hospital. When her health improves, she will be transferred to the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research at Memorial Hermann.

Over the weekend, Dr. John Holcomb, a trauma surgeon at Memorial Hermann, said Ms. Giffords could not begin intensive rehabilitation right away. He said a slight buildup of spinal fluid in her brain after her transfer by air to Houston from Tucson on Friday made it impossible to shift her to the rehabilitation center in the complex.

The congresswoman has a catheter draining fluid from her skull, part of which was removed to relieve pressure after the shooting

Sam Dolnick and Ford Burkhart contributed reporting from Tucson, and James C. McKinley Jr. from Houston.

    Tucson Suspect Pleads Not Guilty, NYT, 24.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/us/25loughner.html

Tucson Attack Reawakens Pain From Virginia Tech

January 24, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

BLACKSBURG, Va. — In the parlance of trauma, Jerzy Nowak considers himself a “secondary victim.” His wife, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French teacher, was one of the 32 people who were killed at Virginia Tech here on April 16, 2007, by a crazed gunman who then killed himself in the worst campus shooting in American history.

The effects of that massacre linger, and they reverberate anew every time another gunman goes on another rampage, as one did this month in Tucson.

Mental health experts say that it generally takes between two and five years for secondary victims — loved ones and survivors of such traumatic events — to “come to terms with new realities” and “reconstruct a new life.” Mr. Nowak, 64, is nearing his fourth year, and still does not use the word “recovery.”

“You never recover,” he said sadly the other day, in a thick Polish accent. “This is a myth. You just learn to live. Or adapt. This is a big word, recovery.”

The traditional stages of grief are achingly familiar by now, but like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each secondary victim and survivor travels involuntarily through those stages in his or her own way. Mr. Nowak agreed to talk about his experience in the hope that doing so might provide some solace and guidance for families and survivors in Tucson.

He grew up on a subsistence farm in communist Poland, and rose to become chairman of Virginia Tech’s department of horticulture. After the shootings, he helped found the university’s new Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, which was dedicated in 2008, and became its director.

His office is literally at the scene of the crime, or the major scene: in Norris Hall, the stone academic building where Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, slaughtered 30 people (he had already killed two others in a dormitory). In the second-floor classroom adjacent to Mr. Nowak’s new office, Mr. Cho killed Ms. Couture-Nowak, a French Canadian who was 49, and 11 students, wounding six others during their French class. The carnage blocked the police from opening the door.

“It was very likely my wife was killed somewhere in this spot,” Mr. Nowak said, looking down at the floor through the classroom door. “It was very hard for me to come here” at first, he said. “I would come on soft knees” — he felt like his knees would give way. Now he no longer relives what he calls “the tragedy,” but he often revisits it.

Planning the nonviolence center and transforming what he described as an “old, cold war classroom” into a modern, light-filled space helped keep him distracted and busy.

Mr. Nowak was across campus on the day of the shooting and was not really sure where his wife was. Calls to her cellphone went unanswered. (Police would later report the haunting sound of cellphones ringing inside body bags as the dead were carried out.) She missed picking up their 12-year-old daughter, Sylvie, from school. At 12:30 a.m., about 15 hours after Ms. Couture-Nowak was killed, two university officials arrived at the Nowak house. The family had just moved there six weeks before, and Ms. Couture-Nowak, a charismatic woman who loved to cook, had been enjoying her new kitchen appliances and planning a garden. The officials confirmed Mr. Nowak’s worst fear.

Later, he woke up Sylvie, embraced her and whispered the grim news in her ear. After a while, she told her father that there was a boy in her class whose mother had died of cancer two years before and that he was O.K.

This father and daughter were starting fresh with each other; Ms. Couture-Nowak had been the glue holding the family together.

“There were just the two of us now and we hardly knew each other,” Mr. Nowak said. “So we had to build a relationship and it was hard on both of us.”

The first few days were overwhelming. His phone company proved a particular annoyance. The voice-mail box at home was full but he could not remember the access code (Ms. Couture-Nowak, who managed the household and finances, was also the keeper of the codes), and it was a frustrating ordeal to retrieve it. The company also charged him for her cellphone for a few months after she was killed, but eventually sent a refund.

On the first day, they had 100 visitors. On the second day, he said, he finally fell apart as he pondered what lay ahead. In the near term, he had to decide whether Ms. Couture-Nowak should be cremated, which they had never discussed, and how to keep what he called “snooping journalists” away. In the long term, he worried about raising a daughter alone and keeping his job and whether, without his wife’s income, he would have to sell their new house. As family members began arriving from Canada — the Red Cross provided shuttle service from the airport — they helped with answering the phone, doing household chores and handling the news media.

More than 700 people came to the funeral, including a woman whom Mr. Nowak hardly knew. She began hovering in the Nowak house for 10 to 12 hours a day and sat in the family section at the funeral, though she was not a relative. She turned out to be a stalker. One day, while Mr. Nowak was cleaning the kitchen floor, the woman declared her love for him. He reported her to the police, then wrote to her, asking her to stay away, which she did.

At work, Mr. Nowak became stressed, having to manage his department at a time of budget cuts and collective mourning. He initially lost weight, but later gained it back — so much, in fact, that his wedding ring cut into his finger and he no longer wears it.

Ms. Couture-Nowak was a triathlete, and when her family came for the funeral, they brought a videotape of her winning a race in Nova Scotia. Sylvie told her father she wanted to train for a triathlon too, and a few months later, she won her first meet for her age group, which was then 13. “When she crossed the line, she said, ‘Dad, I wish Mom could see me,’ ” he said, tears in his eyes at the recollection.

His daughter still has recurring nightmares, he said, in which her mother is dying in front of her. “Having to imagine it may be worse than actually seeing it,” Mr. Nowak said. He said that in his dreams, he constantly reassures his wife that she does not need to worry about him and Sylvie. In these dreams, his wife never speaks.

One development he did not expect was the support on campus for gun rights. The owner of the online company that sold Mr. Cho one of the guns he used spoke at Virginia Tech (university officials allowed it, but denounced his “insensitivity”) and offered discounts to students, saying they needed to protect themselves. In addition, some students advocated on behalf of concealed-carry laws. Mr. Nowak said they bullied students who had joined a nonviolence club. “We lost half the members of the nonviolence club because they were afraid,” he said.

When he heard about Tucson, he thought, “Oh, no, not again.”

“It’s hard for me to comprehend that someone who is mentally ill is not treated and is ignored by his peers and can buy guns,” he said. “This is not an individual right, this is an individual crime.”

The right, he said, is to safety.

Mr. Nowak works with at-risk youths, as he always has, and Sylvie now has her driver’s license, but the past is hard to escape. They still receive calls and cards on Ms. Couture-Nowak’s birthday and on the anniversary of the shootings. There are memorial services every year, lectures, dedications, tributes during football games, all drawing them back. A foundation for victims and survivors is seeking approval for a Virginia license plate that would say “In Remembrance, April 16, 2007.”

“I have to ask not to receive these cards,” Mr. Nowak said. “My daughter says, ‘Why are they doing this to us, Dad? When will this be over? Why don’t they let us live?’ ”

    Tucson Attack Reawakens Pain From Virginia Tech, NYT, 24.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/us/25vatech.html

Shot in the Head, but Getting Back on His Feet and on With His Life

January 23, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — Mark Steinhubl does not remember being shot. The bullet tore into his skull just above the right eye and cut through the right side of his brain. The slug obliterated some memories.

He woke in a room full of white lights and bleeping machines, his head a mass of bandages. His parents were there. Doctors and nurses came and went through a swinging door, asking him to hold up fingers or follow a penlight with his eye.

Time collapsed. He remembers only snatches, snapshots. Friends’ faces. His parents saying he had been shot. Scrawling messages about his pain on a white board. Tossing a pencil at a visitor.

“I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t move my right side at all,” Mr. Steinhubl said. “That was really confusing to me. I would touch the parts of my face with bandages. I was confused and frustrated. Why was I in such a white place?”

Few people understand what Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona faces as she begins her rehabilitation at the Memorial Hermann hospital complex in Houston, but Mr. Steinhubl, a 20-year-old college student, is one of them.

Two years ago, he suffered an ordeal similar to Ms. Giffords’s — a bullet damaging half the brain, the deadly buildup of spinal fluid, the removal of a piece of his skull by surgeons to relieve pressure. He also went through the same program at the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research that Ms. Giffords is expected to follow.

“She needs to realize that it won’t be instantaneous,” Mr. Steinhubl said in an interview. “She needs to set these small goals for herself.”

Early on the morning of Jan. 4, 2009, on the last day of Christmas break, Mr. Steinhubl was shot in the head at a friend’s house. He declines to talk about the shooting, but court records show that the person who shot him was a fellow senior at his Houston high school.

Mr. Steinhubl was taken by ambulance to Ben Taub General Hospital in Houston, where trauma surgeons cut away part of his skull and gave him drugs to induce a coma, waking him only for short stretches once a day for neurological tests. He underwent four major operations. He lost his right eye and all hearing in his right ear.

Four weeks later, paralyzed on his left side, he was wheeled into the rehabilitation institute flat on his back on a gurney, wearing a helmet to protect the side of his head where the skull had been removed. He could not even sit up for more than a couple of seconds without being overwhelmed with dizziness.

It was the beginning of months of frustrating rehabilitation, relearning things he had learned as small child: how to walk, bathe, brush his teeth, tie his shoes. “It was a long process, and I was really impatient,” he said.

But Mr. Steinhubl managed to graduate from Jesuit Strake College Preparatory on time that May and entered Texas A&M University just nine months after the shooting. That rapid progress is a testament not only to the skills of the therapists at the institute, which has a national reputation for helping survivors of brain injuries, but also to his own drive. “I was really determined to get back to my life,” he said.

Ms. Giffords, who remains in intensive care at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, is expected to be transferred to the institute as soon as her health improves. On Sunday, her doctors said she was likely to remain in intensive care until at least the end of the week because of a slight buildup of spinal fluid in her brain after she was flown to Houston from Tucson on Friday.

The congresswoman has a catheter draining fluid from her skull, and it must be removed or replaced with a more permanent shunt before she can be transferred. “We just have to wait and see if the fluid buildup issue resolves itself,” said Dr. John Holcomb, a trauma surgeon and retired Army colonel.

Before his shooting, Mr. Steinhubl had been a top student at his prep school and a hooker on the school’s varsity rugby team. He was 180 pounds of muscle, an energetic and bright young man who had scored high on his SAT and was applying to elite colleges.

“He was a normal 18-year-old who didn’t have a whole lot of use for his parents,” said his mother, Marie.

After his injury, Mr. Steinhubl said, it became a challenge simply to sit up in bed. He and his therapist would set small goals — for instance, to sit up for five seconds at a time — then try to accomplish them. By the end of a week, he was able to sit in a wheelchair. The footrests were taken off, forcing him to propel himself down the hallway. He slowly regained use of his legs.

“In my mind I could do all these things, but when I was sending these messages to my body, I couldn’t,” Mr. Steinhubl said. “I felt like I could run down to the basketball court and start playing, and I couldn’t.”

Another therapist worked on his paralyzed left arm. At first, he was asked to set it on a wheeled board and roll it back and forth, using his shoulder muscles. Over days, his ability to control the muscles came back. When he had use of the arm again, the therapists put a mitten on his right hand to force him to use his left for everything.

By the second week, he was being asked to stand for a few seconds at a time, then to lengthen that time incrementally. Then therapists taught him to walk again, just as one does with a baby. He held the therapist’s arms at the elbows and shuffled forward as the therapist moved backward. Later, he would push a grocery cart full of basketballs up and down the halls.

Days at the institute can be grueling for patients, Mr. Steinhubl said. Every morning patients are asked to write out their goals for that morning — to stand a few more minutes, to tie their shoes, to dress themselves. Many of the fine-motor exercises seem simple, but they can be extremely difficult for someone with a brain injury. He spent hours picking up marbles with his left hand or putting toothpicks in a jar.

He had to fight feelings of depression and hopelessness. Early on in his stay, he recalled an irrational moment when he refused to get into the wheelchair that had been brought to his bedside. “I knew if I did I would never walk,” he said. Eventually his therapist persuaded him that the wheelchair was a necessary step on the road to standing up.

“We know a lot of kids his age who didn’t jump out of bed and go to their therapy,” said his father, Andy Steinhubl, a management consultant. “There was a lot of depression evident. I didn’t see that with Mark.”

Mark Steinhubl said he just wanted to escape the hospital. “I knew I was going to get out — I was going to go back and live my life,” he said.

Not only did his body seem to ignore his will at times, but his mind was dulled as well. He labored over simple math problems that his speech therapist gave him and had trouble recalling the details of stories he had just read. Even forming simple sentences seemed to take more mental effort. “It was really slow, and I had to really dig for the answers,” he said.

In his third week at the institute, Mr. Steinhubl started walking, and his recovery picked up speed. By the end of a month, he was able to balance on one leg and jog down the hall. He was sent home on Feb. 28, three months before his caregivers had predicted he would leave. He still faced months of therapy at an outpatient clinic.

In March, he had surgery to cement back in place the pieces of skull doctors had removed after the shooting. He started going back to school, but could handle only three hours a day and had to rest for a period between classes.

These days, he is a sophomore at A&M, living on his own in an apartment. He has adjusted to being deaf in one ear and to the loss of his eye. But he still has not regained full use of his left hand, and his days of playing guitar are over. “I can play Guitar Hero,” he says, smiling at the plastic guitar that goes with the video game.

Mr. Steinhubl said he has yet to decide what to do with his life. He is studying chemical engineering, but also taking courses that would pave the way to medical school. His brain is still healing, he says, and he cannot yet take a full load of courses. He needs extra time on tests and has trouble taking notes in lectures.

But he is alive, he points out.

“I know there is a plan for me being here, because God decided to keep me around,” he said. “There must be a reason.”

    Shot in the Head, but Getting Back on His Feet and on With His Life, NYT, 23.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/us/24rehab.html

Wal-Mart Shooting Leaves 2 Dead

January 23, 2011
Filed at 10:20 p.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PORT ORCHARD, Wash. (AP) — A shootout in front of a Walmart in Washington state left two people dead and two sheriff's deputies wounded Sunday afternoon, a sheriff's spokesman said.

One of the dead was a man who shot at deputies, said Scott Wilson of the Kitsap County Sheriff's Office. The other victim was a young woman who died after she was taken to a Tacoma hospital, he said.

The deputies' wounds did not appear life-threatening, Wilson said.

Details were sketchy Sunday evening, but the sheriff's office received a call about a suspicious person at the store in Port Orchard, Wilson said. The man ran and started shooting when three deputies tried to talk to him, he said.

The deputies, including the two men who were wounded, returned fire, Wilson said.

Witness Ray Bourge told KOMO-TV that he saw a man running through the parking lot toward nearby woods, firing his gun back toward the store.

"Right behind him there was an officer chasing him, and he began to open fire," Bourge said.

The officer was about 30 to 40 feet behind the suspect when he started firing, Bourge said.

"Five or six shots were fired. ... I just went and took cover," he said.

Witness Victor Meyers told KOMO-TV that he heard the first shot, then six more in rapid succession.

"I heard one shot, which I thought was a car backfiring, and then several more reported back, which I knew to be gunfire," Meyers said.

He said he saw a female deputy running toward a victim on the ground before he and other witnesses were hustled from the scene.

The man who ran from the deputies died of his wounds in the parking lot, Wilson said.

"In the first five minutes, there was already 12 police cars there and then ambulances came just as fast," witness Zach Mendiola told KING-TV.

Wilson said no other suspects were involved in the incident, which began at about 3:45 p.m. He didn't know whether the woman and the man who were killed knew each other. Those two haven't been identified and the deputies' names haven't been released.

The store was immediately locked down. Customers in the store were being allowed to leave after investigators questioned them, and the store closed for the night, Wilson said.

The investigation "is real basic right now," he said, adding that officers don't know why the man fled and began firing.

"The big question of why is unanswered now," he said.

Port Orchard, the county seat with about 8,250 residents, is about 15 miles west of Seattle across Puget Sound.

    Wal-Mart Shooting Leaves 2 Dead, NYT, 24.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/01/23/us/AP-US-Wal-Mart-Shooting.html

4 Detroit Police Injured in Shootout

January 23, 2011
The New York Times
By NICK BUNKLEY

DETROIT — Four police officers were slightly wounded and their assailant killed on Sunday after a man walked into a police precinct and “began shooting indiscriminately,” a spokeswoman for the mayor said.

Karen Dumas, who is spokeswoman for Mayor Dave Bing, said the incident began about 4:30 p.m. when the man walked into the 6th Precinct in the northwestern part of the city and opened fire with a pistol grip shotgun. The man was able to shoot four officers before one or more officers returned fire, killing him.

The most seriously injured police officer was the precinct’s commander, Brian Davis, who was hit in the lower back, Ms. Dumas said. He underwent surgery at the nearby Sinai Grace Hospital on Sunday evening.

“His condition is critical but he is expected to pull through,” Ms. Dumas said.

Two other male officers were hospitalized but expected to be released on Monday. A female officer was hit in the chest but the bulletproof vest she was wearing prevented her from being injured. All four officers were expected to survive, according to a police official at the department’s headquarters who was not authorized to speak to the media.

The police chief, Ralph Godbee, said that the police know the gunman’s identify but did not release that information Sunday as they began to investigate his background and possible motive. It was unclear whether the gunman had previous contact with the precinct or was targeting any specific officers.

Chief Godbee described the scene as one of “utter chaos and pandemonium.” But he said the response by other officers prevented the outcome from being worse.

“They did all the things that they’re trained to do under pressure. We’re very blessed to stand before you with the belief that all four of the officers will be OK,” he said at a news conference.

The police station is one of the Detroit Police Department’s eight district offices. Members of the public who enter the station do not pass through metal detectors or otherwise undergo a security screening.

In light of Sunday’s events and the Jan. 8 shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that killed six people and wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others, Chief Godbee said, “We have to take a step back and reassess security procedures at each one of our facilities. Incidents like this are very sobering and remind us how vulnerable we all are.”

The shooting came at the end of a weekend in which at least 10 people were shot in Detroit in three separate incidents. Three men were found murdered in a house on Friday night, and three people were hospitalized Sunday morning after being shot outside a strip club.

Last Monday, a police officer in a Detroit suburb was killed by a suspect in a home burglary. The officer shot and the suspect each died after exchanged fire.

Nick Bunkley reported from Detroit, and Michael Roston from New York.

    4 Detroit Police Injured in Shootout, NYT, 23.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/us/24detroit.html

Two Weeks After Rampage in Tucson, Survivors Struggle With ‘What If?’

January 22, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA and SAM DOLNICK

TUCSON — What if he had not had that second cup of coffee? What if he had not asked the cashier about the two-for-one special on cigarettes? Maybe he would have been there a minute, or just 30 seconds, earlier. Maybe that would have been enough.

Joseph Zamudio was like any of the other witnesses to the Jan. 8 shooting rampage here — terrified, bewildered, furious. But he had a gun with him that day, when a young man opened fire, killing six people and wounding 13, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

So now Mr. Zamudio wakes up at night breathless, unable to fall back to sleep, torturing himself about whether he might have done more that morning to stop the gunman.

As victims and witnesses in the shootings replay the day in their minds, some — like Mr. Zamudio, who was there to buy cigarettes and ended up helping restrain the gunman — ask themselves what they could have, maybe should have, done differently.

What if Ms. Giffords’s aides had requested security? What if the bystanders had been quicker to tackle Jared L. Loughner, the 22-year-old accused in the shootings? What if they had just gone somewhere else that day? Why did they live when others, standing just inches away, had died?

Psychologists have a term for it: “survivor’s guilt.”

“They have to call it something,” said Mr. Zamudio, who has been seeing a counselor regularly since the shooting. He finds that talking helps.

So does Suzi Hileman, who days after the shooting awoke in her hospital bed shouting: “Christina! Christina!”

That Saturday morning, Ms. Hileman picked up Christina-Taylor Green, her 9-year-old neighbor, and promised the girl’s mother that they would return in three or four hours.

Ms. Hileman, 59, had simply wanted to take Christina to meet their congresswoman. They would make a day of it — going for lunch and a manicure after the “Congress on Your Corner” event outside a local Safeway. Instead, a gunman opened fire, killing Christina and wounding Ms. Hileman.

“I never got to bring Christina home,” Ms. Hileman said. By now, her voice is almost matter-of-fact. But her sadness is betrayed by the long pauses she takes, the way she buries her face in a throw pillow when the tears start to fall.

The guilt comes in waves. It was there in the hospital. It still lurks, threatening to return at any moment. When someone asks about it, she calls her husband over to hold her hand as she answers.

For Ms. Hileman, the rawness of the guilt has worn off, along with her pain medication. As she sat on her couch last week, the evening after returning home from the hospital, she raked her hands through her cropped salt-and-pepper hair and repeated the same thing she had said to herself for days and days.

It almost sounds like an affirmation: “I am a woman who took a little girl to the market,” Ms. Hileman said.

It is the ordinariness that confounds her. “I don’t feel guilty about that,” she continued. “I can feel bad about what happened, but I can’t feel bad about being there. What happened had nothing to do with Christina and me and why we were there.”

Survivor’s guilt is intensely complicated and personal. Randy Gardner, who was shot in the foot that morning, wonders if he could have done more, somehow, rather than running to protect himself. Ronald Barber, who leads Ms. Giffords’s district office, has asked himself countless times why he survived while two of his friends, standing on either side of him, did not.

Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, a professor and the chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, said that this sort of traumatic experience inevitably changes people, creating “soul-searching moments.”

“None of the people that were there will ever be the same,” Dr. Lieberman said. “The question is how they will handle this. Will they grow and use this as a positive psychological adaptation? Or will it gnaw at them and be a memory that gives them emotional distress?”

Perhaps nobody asks himself more questions than Mr. Zamudio, 24, who arrived at the Safeway parking lot just as the shooting stopped, his gun tucked inside his jacket.

He did not use it, did not even pull it from his pocket. He had been in Walgreens, buying Camel cigarettes and asking about the two-for-one special. By the time he ran to the Safeway, the shooting was over. People were on the ground, already dead, or close to it. Now, the weight of those 30 seconds can be crushing.

“Maybe he could have only got through half his clip if I had gotten there in time,” Mr. Zamudio said, his voice flat and eyes distant. “I shouldn’t have been there buying cigarettes. I should have been there to shoot him.”

Ms. Hileman, a former social worker, says asking “What if?” is a waste of energy. But she knows that the question could come racing into her mind at any second. She has not spent much time alone since the shooting; she has been constantly surrounded by her closest friends, her daughter and her husband.

So Ms. Hileman is dealing with her feelings the best way she knows — she is talking to anyone who will listen. (“I’ll be talking in my grave,” she told a visitor.) For years, she worked in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, helping others cope with tragedy.

When Ms. Hileman was still in the hospital, after being shot three times and shattering her hip when the bullets knocked her down, she said the biggest challenge to her recovery would be getting past the guilt.

But in many ways, she is among the most sympathetic characters in the aftermath of the shooting. She is the woman any mother can identify with. She said she was “overwhelmed by the outpouring of love” from friends, neighbors, even strangers.

With her adult children hundreds of miles away and no grandchildren, Ms. Hileman has taken several youngsters in the neighborhood under her wing. With Christina, she bonded over games of pickup sticks. And she saw herself in the child.

“She was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead,” Ms. Hileman said. “We were definitely a couple of partners in crime.”

Now, Ms. Hileman said, “I’m just really, really sad. I lost a friend. My girlfriend died 10 days ago. How would you feel?”

Several parents in the neighborhood have already volunteered to take their children to visit Ms. Hileman, lest she get bored or worry that she is no longer trusted. The Hilemans have already reconnected with Christina’s parents, John and Roxanna Green.

They cried together. They promised one another to seek professional help. And they said they would remain in frequent touch. When Mr. Green drove by with his son the other day, Ms. Hileman vowed that there would be more backyard water gun fights.

In a certain sense, Ms. Hileman sees herself, along with Ms. Giffords, as the third corner of a triangle — she wanted Christina to know that she, too, could become the kind of woman who emanated intelligence and pizazz.

“Christina and I were doing exactly what we wanted to do,” Ms. Hileman said. “We weren’t dragging somebody to the movies. We were happy. Some idiot decided to rain on my parade.”

    Two Weeks After Rampage in Tucson, Survivors Struggle With ‘What If?’, NYT, 22.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/us/23survivors.html

Saner Gun Laws

January 22, 2011
The New York Times

It is widely believed in Washington that there is no chance the gun lobby and the new Republican majority in the House would ever permit passage of the modest ideas for tightening America’s absurdly lax gun laws that have surfaced since the massacre in Tucson.

That may be true, but it is no reason for supporters of reasonable gun regulation not to put up a fight. Nor is it an excuse for the lack of principled presidential leadership on this issue. We are still waiting for President Obama to fulfill his promises on gun safety.

Mr. Obama ran for the White House calling for the restoration of the ban on assault weapons that Congress irresponsibly let expire in 2004. He has not pursued that goal, and so far, his voice is missing even from the call for less ambitious but necessary changes in gun laws. The country needs Mr. Obama to put his support behind a two-pronged approach that is directly relevant to the dynamics of gun violence we all saw at play in Tucson.

It begins with a proposed ban on the big volume ammunition magazines that added to the carnage not just in Arizona but also a long line of other mass shootings, including at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. Even former Vice President Dick Cheney, a staunch gun rights advocate, said last week that it might be time to reinstate the magazine-size rule, which was part of the discarded assault weapons ban. That would save lives without interfering with hunters or violating any constitutional right.

Mr. Obama ought to tell that to Congress and the public in his State of the Union address this week. The National Rifle Association will counter that Americans need high-capacity clips for self-defense. We’d like to hear how many times in the real world the life of an American, other than a police officer or a combat soldier, was endangered because of an inability to fire 30 shots in rapid succession without reloading. What we do know about is the grim, repetitive reality of mass shootings.

The pending gun agenda also includes plugging dangerous holes in the background check system to make it harder for people with emotional and drug abuse problems, like the Tucson shooter, to obtain weapons. Despite eroding public support for more strict rules, like a handgun ban, there is broad agreement on the need to keep guns from getting into the wrong hands.

Although facing a likely primary challenge from the right when he runs for re-election next year, Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, voiced his continued support for banning assault weapons in a recent interview with Bloomberg News.

Another Republican, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, opposes banning the enlarged magazines. But on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Mr. Coburn expressed an interest in a bipartisan effort to create a new legal standard to “make sure people who are mentally ill cannot get and use a gun.” His interest in finding common ground is encouraging even though for the moment, at least, the fix is unclear.

One thing that could be usefully addressed is that many state records on disqualifying involuntary commitments and adjudicated mental instability are not being submitted to the federal background check system. Records of drug abuse or addiction also rarely make it into the system, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun policy group.

Asked last week about the administration’s positions on these matters, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the White House was focused on “the important healing process.” That is part of the president’s duties. So is protecting public safety.

    Saner Gun Laws, NYT, 22.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/opinion/23sun1.html

Obama’s Gun Play

January 21, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

President Obama is under renewed pressure from his base to demonstrate that he is, indeed, a principled man of unwavering conviction rather than a pliant political reed willingly bent and bowed by ever-shifting winds.

This time the issue is gun control.

Pre-presidency, Obama had been a strong supporter of gun-control initiatives. Since then, however, he has remained curiously quiet on the issue in general and following the Tucson shooting in particular.

The question now is: which Obama will show up at the State of the Union?

Obama, the politician, must be hesitant. He’s enjoying a surge in the polls following a successful lame-duck session of Congress in which a few concessions bought substantial gains. And his handling of the shooting seemed to strike the right balance with the overwhelming majority of Americans. He’s on a roll!

Furthermore, according to a 2005 Gallup poll, gun owners are almost twice as likely to be white as nonwhite, are more than three times as likely to be male as female and are more likely to live in the South and Midwest than in the East or West. Yes, you guessed it: This fits the profile of the voters Obama has lost and needs to win back if he wants to be re-elected.

And no one wants to upset the powerful gun-rights lobby, whose campaign-finance clout dwarfs that of the gun-control lobby. According to data from the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group the Center for Responsive Politics, the gun-rights lobby has contributed more than $24 million in election cycles from 1990 to 2010. About 85 percent went to Republicans. By comparison, the gun-control lobby donated less than $2 million in the same period, mostly to Democrats.

That said, Obama the gun-control supporter surely knows how anomalous we are among comparable nations. We are a violent society whose intense fealty to firearms has deadly consequences. Sensible restrictions on the most dangerous weapons could go a long way toward making us safer.

According to 2005 data from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, a comparison of member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for which data were available showed that the U.S. is in a league of its own, and not in a good way. We have nearly 9 guns for every 10 people, and about 9 out of every 10 of our homicides are committed with one of those guns. No other country even comes close.

At the moment, there is popular support for more restrictions. According to a NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, 52 percent of Americans asked believed that laws covering the sale of guns should be made more strict. Will Obama seize the sentiment? This is a test of character: Will the president choose what is right over what is convenient and speak out for what he believes in?

Next week we will see which Obama emerges: a stalwart of conviction, an exemplar of expediency or someone still stuck in the ambiguous middle of conciliation and pseudocourage.

    Obama’s Gun Play, NYT, 21.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/opinion/22blow.html

In Tucson, Solace From Relatives of Past Killers

January 21, 2011
The New York Times
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

TUCSON — Few visitors make their way past the cactus garden and into the dark ranch-style home where Randy and Amy Loughner have spent much time grieving alone. The rampage in which their troubled 22-year-old son is accused opened a fault line between them and the rest of this recovering city.

But beyond Tucson, two people who have never met the Loughners are now seeking them out, and others are likely to follow.

When Jared L. Loughner was identified as the gunman who shot 19 people here two Saturdays ago, his parents joined a circle whose membership is a curse: the kin of those who have gone on killing sprees. Now, others in this circle of relatives are beginning to issue invitations to the Loughners.

David Kaczynski, brother of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, left a message with Mr. Loughner’s public defender offering his ear if the parents wanted to talk to “someone with a similar experience,” he recalled.

Robert P. Hyde of Albuquerque had the same instinct. The brother of a mentally ill man who killed five people, two of them police officers, Mr. Hyde looked up the Loughners’ address and mailed them a letter inviting them to contact him. The gist of his letter, Mr. Hyde said by phone, was that “what happened is not your fault.”

After killing sprees in American towns and cities, the relatives of the gunmen face the intense scrutiny of neighbors who wonder how far the apple fell from the tree, or if the home environment was abusive, shaping a killer. Grief from these relatives can provoke a complex reaction as the outside world ponders whether they are victims in their own right, or the gunman’s enablers, or both.

While the actual victims of crimes and their relatives “have people pulling for them,” Mr. Hyde said, “we on the other side don’t want to even broach that subject. I will never say, ‘I lost my brother, too — I’ll never go fishing with him again.’

“It would look cold and callous,” he added. “People don’t understand. And you don’t want to offend anybody.”

So, he concluded, “you just suck it up.”

If that gets to be too much, the relatives of killers have been known to find comfort in one another, creating a fragile and fraught emotional network among the nation’s most isolated families.

After his brother’s daylong rampage in 2005, Mr. Hyde called David Kacynzski, by then a prominent campaigner against the death penalty. At the time, Mr. Hyde was in such a daze, so consumed with questions — How did this happen? What could I have done differently? — that he could hardly even get dressed in the morning.

“We talked,” Mr. Hyde, 50, recalled. “It was very helpful, a spiritual kind of thing. The fact is we were both brothers who had a brother who did this.”

A need for legal advice — such as how to help a brother or son avoid the death penalty — can prompt these phone calls. In 1999, William Babbitt, the brother of a mentally ill man on death row in California, contacted Mr. Kaczynski because he felt his brother should be spared the death penalty, just as Theodore Kaczynski had been.

The loose network among relatives offers the grim solace of knowing that others too have suffered the same curse.

Mr. Kaczynski recalls feeling reassured more than a decade ago — while his brother was still under prosecution — upon receiving a note from the parents of John C. Salvi III, who had murdered two abortion-clinic receptionists. “We’re thinking about you, we’re praying for you, and we understand,” was the message, Mr. Kaczynski said.

“At first, you feel like you’re the only person this has ever happened to,” said Lois Robison, whose mentally ill son was executed in Texas in 2000 for the murder of five people. “You’re no longer Ken and Lois Robison, the two schoolteachers. You’re Ken and Lois Robison, the parents of a mass murderer.”

Ms. Robison, 77, now regularly speaks with the families of other men the state has executed.

Reflecting on the Tucson shootings, Ms. Robison was reminded of her reaction to learning about her son’s rampage: she could not stop sobbing until she was given sedatives. She said she expected the Loughners now felt like “pariahs”; she, too, struggled with the feeling. After her son’s crimes, some parents sought to have their children transferred out of her class.

Even though the pack of reporters outside the Loughner home has gone, the parents still live in virtual hiding. Until Monday, when the Loughners emerged and stepped into a waiting car, there had been so few signs of life inside that neighbors had assumed the couple had left town.

Since then, Mr. Loughner, a tall man with a bushy mustache, has occasionally been seen speeding away from his house in a black El Camino. On Thursday afternoon, he had a baseball hat pulled low over his eyes as he hustled out of the car, hastened to his house and quickly disappeared behind a wooden gate without saying a word.

Capt. Mark E. Kelly, the husband of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically wounded in the attack, has told ABC News that he was open to the idea of meeting with Mr. Loughner’s parents, adding, “They’ve got to be hurting in this situation as much as anybody.”

Captain Kelly’s comments have prompted plenty of reflection among those who have already gone through this familiar healing ritual, in which the family of the murdered meet the family of the murderer.

Bill McVeigh, the father of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh, in a phone conversation Thursday with Bud Welch, the father of a victim of that attack, ventured that “this was quite soon for one of the victim’s family members to be talking about that,” according to Mr. Welch’s account. In their case, Mr. McVeigh and Mr. Welch, who talk every few months, did not meet for more than three years after the younger McVeigh’s act of terror.

While Mr. Hyde and a few others sought out the relatives of other killers on their own, many do not. In fact, the relatives of perpetrators are such pariahs that it was a crime victims’ group that first organized a formal meeting of them. In 2005, a group of relatives of murder victims, all opposed to the death penalty, held a conference for the relatives of some 20 people who had been executed for capital crimes.

It was “the first time in the modern era there was ever assembled in a room a couple of dozen people who had all shared the experience of having a family member executed, and found a little empathy and solidarity for a group that has had none,” said Renny Cushing, the executive director of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, which organized the meeting.


Marc Lacey and Carli Brosseau contributed reporting.

    In Tucson, Solace From Relatives of Past Killers, NYT, 21.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/us/22relatives.html

After Tucson, a New Focus on Guns

January 21, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Bob Herbert is to be commended for highlighting the need for legislation to reduce the risk of further tragedies from handguns in this country (“Helpless in the Face of Madness,” column, Jan. 15).

I spent more than 30 years in the Foreign Service. I recall being asked on more than one occasion how it could be that handguns in the United States are easier to obtain than a driver’s license. Many of our overseas friends feel that we reap what we sow by our lax gun laws.

I hear President Obama’s plea for civility. From now on I will no longer refer to those who oppose gun control as “gun nuts.” I will refer to this cohort as my misguided brothers and sisters and hope that we can engage in a civil debate on the need to ban assault weapons.

Peter F. Spalding
Washington, Jan. 15, 2011

•

To the Editor:

In “How Many Deaths Are Enough?” (column, Jan. 18), Bob Herbert recommends stricter licensing and registration of guns, more vigorous background checks and a ban on assault weapons. I agree.

And I have another suggestion: gun insurance. Mandatory liability insurance for gun owners sounds to me like an idea whose time has come. With this approach, we can respect what many interpret as a constitutional right to bear arms, while at the same time making those who possess and use weapons pay for the risk that they pose to the rest of us.

Caroline Herzenberg
Chicago, Jan. 18, 2011

•

To the Editor:

I applaud Nicholas D. Kristof’s proposal that guns should be regulated, just as we do to other potentially dangerous products (“Why Not Regulate Guns as Seriously as Toys?,” column, Jan. 13).

It seems to me that the most logical extension of that idea would be to require a license, similar to a driver’s license, for which you would have to take a test.

It would test the applicant’s psychological soundness and anger management abilities. It seems to me that hunters in the National Rifle Association should not object to such a requirement.

After all, in Canada, where guns are also plentiful, a safety course is required before you purchase a gun.

Wendy Perron
New York, Jan. 13, 2011

•

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof attacked my research in his Jan. 13 column. While conceding that “concealed weapons didn’t lead to the bloodbath that liberals had forecast,” Mr. Kristof asserted that “many studies have now debunked” my finding that more guns lead to less crime.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of studies support my results. Among peer-reviewed studies in academic journals by criminologists and economists, 18 studies examining national data find that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime, 10 indicate no discernible effect and none find a bad effect from the law. Among non-refereed studies, three find drops in crime and two say either no effect or possibly small increases in crime.

Mr. Kristof cites a public health professor’s suggestions for one-gun-a-month sales limits, gun safes and further background checks, but I know of no academic criminologists or economists who have found that these laws reduce any type of violent crime. No gun ban has reduced murder rates. John R. Lott Jr.
Alexandria, Va., Jan. 17, 2011

The writer is the author of “More Guns, Less Crime.”

•

To the Editor:

The show must go on. The annual Shot Show in Las Vegas, that is. Is there no more jarring juxtaposition than the Jan. 20 news article “Giffords Set for Transfer to Rehabilitation Center,” with an accompanying photo of tributes to the congresswoman, above a photo of an array of weapons at the gun show (“In an Ocean of Firearms, Tucson Is Far Away,” news article, Jan. 20)?

The most distressing aspect is that there is not even a pretense that the recent events in Tucson give the gun lovers and lobbyists pause for reflection. The party line is that the fault lies not in our guns but in our mental health care system.

When the best we have to hope for is the most limited of conversations on the size of the magazine, not the scope of the arsenal, it is clear that the only lesson learned from this tragedy is that there were few, if any, lessons learned.

Robert S. Nussbaum
Fort Lee, N.J., Jan. 20, 2011

    After Tucson, a New Focus on Guns, NYT, 21.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/opinion/l22guns.html

Myth of the Hero Gunslinger

January 20, 2011
9:00 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

PHOENIX — To many gun owners, the question of whether to arm even more people in a country that already has upwards of 300 million guns is as calcified as a Sonoran Desert petroglyph. It’s written in stone, among the fiercest of firearms advocates, that more guns equals fewer deaths.

But before the Tucson tragedy fades into tired talking points, it’s worth dissecting the crime scene once more to see how this idea fared in actual battle.

First, one bit of throat-clearing: I’m a third-generation Westerner, and grew up around guns, hunters of all possible fauna, and Second Amendment enthusiasts who wore camouflage nine months out of the year. Generally, I don’t have a problem with any of that.

Back to Tucson. On the day of the shooting, a young man named Joseph Zamudio was leaving a drugstore when he saw the chaos at the Safeway parking lot. Zamudio was armed, carrying his 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. Heroically, he rushed to the scene, fingering his weapon, ready to fire.

Now, in the view of the more-guns proponents, Zamudio might have been able to prevent any carnage, or maybe even gotten off a shot before someone was killed.

“When everyone is carrying a firearm, nobody is going to be a victim,” said Arizona state representative Jack Harper, after a gunman had claimed 19 victims.

“I wish there had been one more gun in Tucson,” said an Arizona Congressman, Rep. Trent Franks, implying like Harper that if only someone had been armed at the scene, Jared Lee Loughner would not have been able to unload his rapid-fire Glock on innocent people.

In fact, several people were armed. So, what actually happened? As Zamudio said in numerous interviews, he never got a shot off at the gunman, but he nearly harmed the wrong person — one of those trying to control Loughner.

He saw people wrestling, including one man with the gun. “I kind of assumed he was the shooter,” said Zamudio in an interview with MSNBC. Then, “everyone said, ‘no, no — it’s this guy,’” said Zamudio.

To his credit, he ultimately helped subdue Loughner. But suppose, in those few seconds of confusion, he had fired at the wrong man and killed a hero? “I was very lucky,” Zamudio said.

It defies logic, as this case shows once again, that an average citizen with a gun is going to disarm a crazed killer. For one thing, these kinds of shootings happen far too suddenly for even the quickest marksman to get a draw. For another, your typical gun hobbyist lacks training in how to react in a violent scrum.

I don’t think these are reasons to disarm the citizenry. That’s never going to happen, nor should it. But the Tucson shootings should discredit the canard that we need more guns at school, in the workplace, even in Congress. Yes, Congress. The Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert has proposed a bill to allow fellow members to carry firearms into the Capitol Building.

Gohmert has enough trouble carrying a coherent thought onto the House floor. God forbid he would try to bring a Glock to work. By his reasoning, the Middle East would be better off if every nation in the region had nuclear weapons.

At least two recent studies show that more guns equals more carnage to innocents. One survey by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that guns did not protect those who had them from being shot in an assault — just the opposite. Epidemiologists at Penn looked at hundreds of muggings and assaults. What they found was that those with guns were four times more likely to be shot when confronted by an armed assailant than those without guns. The unarmed person, in other words, is safer.

Other studies have found that states with the highest rates of gun ownership have much greater gun death rates than those where only a small percentage of the population is armed. So, Hawaii, where only 9.7 percent of residents own guns, has the lowest gun death rate in the country, while Louisiana, where 45 percent of the public is armed, has the highest.

Arizona, where people can carry guns into bars and almost anyone can get a concealed weapons permit, is one of the top 10 states for gun ownership and death rates by firearms. And in the wake of the shootings, some lawmakers want to flood public areas with even more lethal weapons.

Tuesday of this week was the first day of classes at Arizona State University, and William Jenkins, who teaches photography at the school, did not bring his weapon to campus. For the moment, it’s still illegal for professors to pack heat while they talk Dante and quantum physics.

But that may soon change. Arizona legislators have been pushing a plan to allow college faculty and students to carry concealed weapons at school.

“That’s insane,” Jenkins told me. “On Mondays I give a lecture to 120 people. I can’t imagine students coming into class with firearms. If something happened, it would be mayhem.”

He’s right. Jenkins is a lifelong gun owner and he carries a concealed weapon, by permit. He also carries a modicum of common sense. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

    Myth of the Hero Gunslinger, NYT, 20.1.2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/myth-of-the-hero-gunslinger/

In an Ocean of Firearms, Tucson Is Far Away

January 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LAS VEGAS — In a sea of rifles, handguns, knives and ammunition, thousands of gun enthusiasts gathered here Wednesday for the annual Shot Show, the nation’s largest gun trade show, where the convention’s sponsors decried gun laws and said there was something else to blame for the Jan. 8 deadly shooting rampage in Tucson: the mental health system.

The Shot Show sponsors as well as several exhibitors and others attending the sprawling event rejected suggestions of a connection between the attack and gun control legislation. Instead, they questioned why people around the man accused of the shootings, Jared L. Loughner — his parents, friends, teachers and the police — had not alerted mental health authorities about his apparent mental decline before the rampage that left 6 people dead and 13 injured.

“What happened wasn’t caused by the failure or absence of some gun control law,” said Lawrence G. Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the organizer of the Shot Show. “It was caused by a breakdown in the public mental health system. The question is why wasn’t this individual dealt with when everyone around him apparently saw there were very real issues.”

“To my mind,” Mr. Keane added, “gun control is a failed social experiment, and it is time to move on.”

Mr. Keane offered that view as 57,000 people, an overflow crowd, turned out for the 50th anniversary of the convention, which spilled out of the Sands Convention Center and into the adjacent Venetian hotel. Throughout the day, the lively crowd —overwhelmingly male, representing gun shops, the military and law enforcement agencies — traipsed through fields of booths that displayed, among other things, rifles, ammunition, silencers, camouflage gear, knives, bulletproof vests, night goggles, holsters and, of course, pistols, including in pink and lavender.

People attending the show were explicitly barred from carrying personal firearms or ammunition.

The Tucson shootings complicated plans for the Shot Show. Sponsors said they had decided after the shootings not to get drawn into debates about gun control until they arrived here to an event that drew 2,200 members of the news media. Still, they said, there was never any doubt that the Shot Show would go on.

And there was little discussion of the events as the crowd surveyed this year’s wares, reflecting a consensus that there was little chance that the shootings would have political ramifications. “Congress is more pro-gun than at any time in recent memory,” Steve Sanetti, president of the shooting sports foundation, proclaimed in the daily newsletter of the convention, Shot Daily.

The carpeted expanse set aside for Glock — maker of the Glock 19 pistol that Mr. Loughner is accused of using — was one of the largest spaces at the convention, and it was bustling with people throughout the day. Two Glock employees, dressed in black, stood on a riser and offered tips on target shooting.

“How many Glock shooters do we have in the crowd?” asked Randi Rogers, one of the instructors, as she flexed a pistol in her arm, bending slightly at the knees. As just about every hand rose, Ms. Rogers smiled and said, “Oh, I like that.”

A Glock sales representative tending to potential customers as they looked at pistols, including a Glock 19, said they had been instructed by the company not to discuss the Tucson shootings or gun control.

“Tucson is a tragedy, but that’s all we have to say about it,” said the sales representative, Tony Musa. “I have no opinion about gun control.”

Mr. Musa referred questions to a Glock vice president, Josh Dorsey.

“Basically, all I can say is no thank you,” Mr. Dorsey said, adding that no one had raised the Tucson shootings with him.

Downstairs, Scherer Supply, an East Tennessee purveyor and maker of shooting supplies, displayed the same kind of extended magazines, including a 33-shot one, that was used in the Tucson shootings. Anthony Scherer, an owner of the company, shook his head vigorously when asked about gun control advocates who have called for restricting the sale of large magazines, which they said contributed to the extent of the carnage on Jan. 8.

“To point any fingers at the gun industry is ignorant,” Mr. Scherer said, as passers-by stopped to pick up and examine the magazines lined up on the counter. “That’s like pointing a finger at Ford and blaming them for car deaths.”

“It’s the same kind of panicked reaction you get after a hurricane,” he said. “It’s over, and everyone wants to get shutters.”

At the Smith and Wesson booth, Chris D’Amato, a Marine from Savannah, Ga., disputed the suggestion that a smaller magazine would have reduced the injuries in Tucson.

“I know where you’re going with that,” Mr. D’Amato said, when asked about the size of the magazine in one of the handguns he and his wife were admiring on a table of military and police guns. “It really doesn’t make much of a difference.”

Mr. Keane of the shooting sports foundation described this as a good time for gun enthusiasts, and said that fears that the Obama administration and a Democratic-controlled Congress would result in a round of new tough gun laws had not been realized.

“People are pleasantly surprised about where we are,” he said. “But we remain ever vigilant.”

Mr. Keane said his organization would support strengthening the federal background check for gun buyers, which he suggested had failed in the case of Mr. Loughner.

“I’m sure the dealer who sold him the gun would have liked to know that this person has had this mental health background,” he said.

Mark Thomas, a managing director with the foundation, said: “The scary thing here is that the things we’ve read, the things we’ve seen, people didn’t seem surprised at this, the way they said, ‘Yeah, he had changed over the last couple of years.’ If you cared about that person, why didn’t you take some action?”

Still, trying to toughen the federal background check system — which is intended to keep felons and people with records of mental health problems, among others, from buying guns — is a subject of debate among gun enthusiasts. They say they are concerned that it would create more obstacles for legitimate gun enthusiasts without deterring people who should not get weapons.

“The devil’s in the details,” Mr. Keane said.

    In an Ocean of Firearms, Tucson Is Far Away, NYT, 19.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/us/20guns.html

Giffords’s Husband Heard His Wife Had Died in Tucson

January 19, 2011
12:34 am
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

While racing to his wife’s side, Mark Kelly, the husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, heard from erroneous television news reports that his wife had been killed when she was shot outside of a Safeway supermarket in Tucson on Jan. 8, he said in a televised interview on Tuesday evening.

In an interview on ABC’s “20/20,” Mr. Kelly said he initially learned that his wife had been shot during a very brief telephone conversation with one of her staffers. Then, as he sat on a friend’s private plane with his mother and children while racing to Tucson, he heard the erroneous report, and for the next 20 minutes he was under the mistaken impression that his wife had died.

“The kids, Claudia and Claire start crying,” he said. “My mother, you know, I think she almost screamed. And I just, you know, walked into the bathroom, and you know, broke down.”

Mr. Kelly, an astronaut, eventually learned that his wife was still alive, and he made it to her side later that day. He told of his ordeal in an interview with Diane Sawyer that aired Tuesday night. It was Mr. Kelly’s first television interview since his wife was critically wounded in the shooting rampage

Six people were killed and another 13 were injured before officers arrested a 22-year-old Tucson man, Jared Lee Loughner, who was later charged with attempted assassination. Representative Giffords has been hospitalized ever since. Doctors said over the weekend that she had been taken off a ventilator and her condition upgraded to serious from critical.

Though her movements and ability to communicate are limited, Mr. Kelly said during the interview with Ms. Sawyer that he believes his wife recognizes him and seems to be very aware.

“If I hold her hand, she’ll play with my wedding ring,” he said. “She’ll move it up and down my finger. She’ll take it off. She’ll put it on her own finger. She’ll move it to her thumb. And then she can put it back on my finger.

“The reason why I know that that means she recognizes me,” he added, “is because she’s done that before. She’ll do that if we’re sitting in a restaurant. She’ll do the same exact movements.”

Those movements help to convince him, at times, that his wife will make a complete recovery. But at other times, he said, he worries that she will never fully be the same — and in particular he worries that parts of her personality will never return.

“She’s got a great sense of humor,” he said. “I’ve thought about whether that part of her will be the same.”

Mr. Kelly also revealed that he and his wife had had dozens of conversations in the last year about death threats she had received and the specter of her getting shot.

“She says, you know, ‘Someday I’m really worried that somebody’s going to come up to me at one of these events with a gun,” he said.

When it finally happened, he said, he was filled with rage.

“I was really angry for two to three days. Very, very angry,” he said. “The first call I received after I arrived at the hospital was President Obama, and I expressed to him how angry I was.”

But despite the widespread assertions that the heated political climate may have played some role in the shooter’s motivation — assertions that have dogged Sarah Palin and other conservative pundits — Mr. Kelly said he felt differently.

“It certainly didn’t cause this,” he said. “It didn’t cause Jared Loughner to, you know, to plan this attack. I think you have somebody that’s really, really disturbed, possibly schizophrenic.”

But he said he hoped nonetheless that his wife’s shooting would help to soothe some of the bitterness.

“Maybe we could use this as an opportunity to make things better,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to just tone it down, try to get back to a better place, try to get to a place where we can just disagree, and get rid of the heated, angry rhetoric.”

Mr. Kelly said he would be willing himself to make an offering of peace — by meeting with Mr. Loughner’s parents, but not with Mr. Loughner.

“I’m sure they love their son. And they must be as distraught over this as all of us are,” he said.

    Giffords’s Husband Heard His Wife Had Died in Tucson, 19.1.2011, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/giffordss-husband-heard-his-wife-had-died-in-tucson/

Mother Sees Hopeful Signs for Giffords

January 18, 2011
The New York Times
By DENISE GRADY and JENNIFER MEDINA

TUCSON — In an exuberant e-mail to family and friends Tuesday, the mother of Representative Gabrielle Giffords described remarkable progress by her daughter. According to the e-mail, Ms. Giffords scrolled through photographs on her husband’s iPhone, tried to undo his tie and shirt and even began to look at get-well cards and pages of large-print text taken from a Harry Potter book.

“Everyday Gabby improves and shows higher levels of comprehension and complex actions,” Ms. Giffords’s mother, Gloria, wrote.

The message from her mother could paint an overly optimistic picture of the congresswoman’s condition. Doctors have said Ms. Giffords is severely injured and faces a very long road to recovery.

Friends and family members said Mrs. Giffords sent the message out early Tuesday morning. Recipients forwarded it to others and a copy was later sent to The New York Times.

In one passage, Mrs. Giffords wrote: “They are even now having her move limbs on command. So now comes the ‘true grit’ part... and won’t be a stroll in a park although Mark predicts she’ll be up and walking around in 2 weeks.” The congresswoman is married to Capt. Mark E. Kelly, a naval officer and astronaut.

Pia Carusone, Ms. Giffords’s chief of staff, cautioned that Mr. Kelly was “ever the optimist.”

“As a sign of confidence in her strength — and one day ability to recover — he has whispered half-jokingly that she’s got two weeks from the day of the injury to be up and walking,” she said.

Mrs. Giffords also said her daughter would be released from the hospital on Friday and taken to a rehabilitation center. Ms. Giffords’s staff said no final decision had been made.

Ms. Giffords’s doctors say they are encouraged but urge caution. She is not yet trying to speak, they said, and the most difficult challenges are still to come.

Dr. Randall S. Friese, a trauma surgeon who has operated on Ms. Giffords, said Monday that Mr. Kelly had told him he believed Ms. Giffords was now smiling.

“I wasn’t there,” Dr. Friese said. “Mark told me that he thought he may have seen her smile. We’re all very optimistic so we could be wrong. So we all want to see the best but sometimes we see what we want to see. But if he says she’s smiling then I buy it.”

    Mother Sees Hopeful Signs for Giffords, NYT, 18.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19email.html

In Tucson, a Staff Mourns While Asking, ‘What Would Gabby Do?’

January 18, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK

TUCSON — They still greet every visitor. They still help veterans file for disability benefits and retirees sign up for Medicare. They still send out press releases, though now they are signed by the chief of staff instead of the boss.

There is an empty desk where a key aide of Representative Gabrielle Giffords sat inside Suite 112 of a modest stucco building here. And though the boss herself is not returning anytime soon, the rest of the staff is struggling every day to adapt to what one of them called “the new normal.”

Ms. Giffords’s aides opened Suite 112, the congresswoman’s district office, two days after the shooting that left her with a severe bullet wound to the head, and the office has stayed open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday since. It has been one of the staff’s few constants since a gunman opened fire at a community event on Jan. 8, killing six people and wounding the congresswoman and 12 others.

Staff members have dived into their jobs as a means of coping with the tragedy. The mantra has been “What Would Gabby Do?” and the answer has been clear — keep working.

“It’s uncharted territory,” said C. J. Karamargin, the congresswoman’s communications director, who has put in endless days since he got a phone call that Saturday morning. “We’re going to continue to advocate for the things that Gabby has always fought for.”

It is difficult to overstate the trauma and grief that lingers in the small office, which is opposite a hair salon and decorated with cowhide-covered chairs and paintings of cowboys. “We’ll get back into a routine, and then someone will see something on TV and there are tears again,” said Mark Kimble, a press aide who was a witness to the shootings. “We’re all still very fragile.”

The empty desk belonged to Gabe Zimmerman, the director of community outreach, who was among those killed. Until a day or two ago, his Diet Dr Peppers still filled the refrigerator.

The office director, Ron Barber, who was shot twice, and Pamela Simon, the outreach coordinator, were wounded. Two other staff members and two interns witnessed the rampage, which occurred in a Safeway parking lot about 10 miles north of their office.

Each day, the staff anxiously awaits word on Ms. Giffords’s condition, buoyed with every bit of hopeful news.

But while doctors say they are encouraged, they also urge caution in assessing her condition. Ms. Giffords is not yet trying to speak, they said, and the most difficult challenges are weeks or months away.

Ms. Giffords’s office has researched what is likely to happen to her Congressional seat during her long recovery. Sitting members of Congress have generally finished out their terms after they have become incapacitated, and historians say there is no modern precedent for declaring a sitting member’s seat to be vacant because of health reasons.

In 1981, the seat of Representative Gladys Noon Spellman, 62, Democrat of Maryland, was vacated before she was sworn in for her fourth term after she went into a “sleeplike state” after suffering a heart attack during the campaign. In a special election that May, Steny H. Hoyer, now the No. 2 Democrat in the House, was chosen to replace her. Ms. Spellman died seven years later.

If Ms. Giffords were to resign, or if her family decides that she will not return, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona would call a special election. But those discussions, if they ever occur, are a long way off.

In the meantime, Ms. Giffords’s constituents have tax issues and visa problems and questions about their mortgages. And her staff members have found some solace in helping.

“We need to feel useful; we need to continue proudly serving, and we can’t let fear or other feelings take over,” said Patty Valera, an aide who helps veterans file for benefits. “Just working isn’t going to take the pain away, but it helps.”

But their jobs have unmistakably changed. Twice a day, a team of interns gathers the hundreds of cards and letters left at memorials at the hospital and outside the office. They enter the signers’ names and their messages into a database. Every one of them will be thanked for expressing their concerns in the polite, grateful tone that staff members say Ms. Giffords would expect.

Police officers are now stationed at the office, which was vandalized last March. A grief counselor from the Congressional Office of Employee Assistance spent last week with the staff.

Reporters’ inquiries arrive in a unrelenting stream. The office set up a new e-mail address to handle all the requests. The first time they checked the in-box, there were more than 900 messages.

“I’ve talked to Der Spiegel, Japanese TV, every U.S. newspaper I’ve ever heard of,” said Mr. Kimble, who said he was getting used to a permanently buzzing BlackBerry.

The staff has worked together for so long that the office functions smoothly, even without Mr. Barber. But there have been moments when no one knew what to do.

There was the announcement last week that the Department of Homeland Security had scrapped plans to build a “virtual fence” across the Mexican border, a project that Ms. Giffords had been following closely. Normally, Mr. Karamargin would have been quick to issue a statement in response. This time, without being able to speak to Ms. Giffords, he did nothing.

Ms. Giffords’s office is not the first to be forced to find its footing without its leader. In 2006, Senator Tim Johnson, Democrat of South Dakota, spent weeks in a coma after suffering a brain hemorrhage.

After grappling with the initial shock, Mr. Johnson’s staff members made the same decision as Ms. Giffords’s — they went back to work.

“It is very therapeutic to feel like you’re a cog in a much bigger system and you can continue to play your role,” said Julianne Fisher, Mr. Johnson’s longtime spokeswoman. “You feel less trapped; you feel less helpless.”

The Giffords office has been developing some new routines. On Wednesday, staff members plan to start answering the phones again rather than let voice mail pick up.

“As tragic as this event was, there are still going to be people coming in,” Mr. Kimble said. “Gabby would not want us to just close the door and not help.”


Jennifer Medina contributed reporting.

    In Tucson, a Staff Mourns While Asking, ‘What Would Gabby Do?’, NYT, 18.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19staff.html

Getting Someone to Psychiatric Treatment Can Be Difficult and Inconclusive

January 18, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER and BENEDICT CAREY

TUCSON —What are you supposed to do with someone like Jared L. Loughner?

That question is as difficult to answer today as it was in the years and months and days leading up to the shooting here that left 6 dead and 13 wounded.

Millions of Americans have wondered about a troubled loved one, friend or co-worker, fearing not so much an act of violence, but — far more likely — self-inflicted harm, landing in the streets, in jail or on suicide watch. But those in a position to help often struggle with how to distinguish ominous behavior from the merely odd, the red flags from the red herrings.

In Mr. Loughner’s case there is no evidence that he ever received a formal diagnosis of mental illness, let alone treatment. Yet many psychiatrists say that the warning sings of a descent into psychosis were there for months, and perhaps far longer.

Moving a person who is resistant into treatment is an emotional, sometimes exhausting process that in the end may not lead to real changes in behavior. Mental health resources are scarce in most states, laws make it difficult to commit an adult involuntarily, and even after receiving treatment, patients frequently stop taking their medication or seeing a therapist, believing that they are no longer ill.

The Virginia Tech gunman was committed involuntarily before killing 32 people in a 2007 rampage.

With Mr. Loughner, dozens of people apparently saw warning signs: the classmates who listened as his dogmatic language grew more detached from reality. The police officers who nervously advised that he could not return to college without a medical note stating that he was not dangerous. His father, who chased him into the desert hours before the attack as Mr. Loughner carried a black bag full of ammunition.

“This isn’t an isolated incident,” said Daniel J. Ranieri, president of La Frontera Center, a nonprofit group that provides mental health services. “There are lots of people who are operating on the fringes who I would describe as pretty combustible. And most of them aren’t known to the mental health system.”

Dr. Jack McClellan, an adult and child psychiatrist at the University of Washington, said he advises people who are worried that someone is struggling with a mental disorder to watch for three things — a sudden change in personality, in thought processes, or in daily living. “This is not about whether someone is acting bizarrely; many people, especially young people, experiment with all sorts of strange beliefs and counterculture ideas,” Dr. McLellan said. “We’re talking about a real change. Is this the same person you knew three months ago?”

Those who have watched the mental unraveling of a loved one say that recognizing the signs is only the first step in an emotional, often confusing, process. About half of people with mental illnesses do not receive treatment, experts estimate, in part because many of them do not recognize that they even have an illness.

Pushing such a person into treatment is legally difficult in most states, especially when he or she is an adult — and the attempt itself can shatter the trust between a troubled soul and the one who is most desperate to help. Others, though, later express gratitude.

“If the reason is love, don’t worry if they’ll be mad at you,” said Robbie Alvarez, 28, who received a diagnosis of schizophrenia after being involuntarily committed when his increasingly erratic behavior led to a suicide attempt. At the time, he said, he was living in Phoenix with his parents, who he was convinced were trying to kill him. In Arizona it is easier to obtain an involuntary commitment than in many states because anyone can request an evaluation if they observe behavior that suggests a person may present a danger or is severely disabled (often state laws require some evidence of imminent danger to self or others).

But there are also questions about whether the system can accommodate an influx of new patients. Arizona’s mental health system has been badly strained by recent budget cuts that left those without Medicaid stripped of most of their services, including counseling and residential treatment, though eligibility remains for emergency services like involuntary commitment. And the state is trying to change eligibility requirements for Medicaid, which would potentially reduce financing further and leave more with limited services.

Still, people who have been through the experience argue that it is better to act sooner rather than later. “It’s not easy to know when we could or should intervene but I would rather err on the side of safety than not,” said H. Clarke Romans, executive director of the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group, who had a son with schizophrenia.

The collective failure to move Mr. Loughner into treatment, either voluntarily or not, will never be fully understood, because those who knew the young man presumably wrestled separately and privately about whether to take action. But the inaction has certainly provoked second-guessing. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima County told CNN last Wednesday that Mr. Loughner’s parents were as shocked as everyone else. “It’s been very, very devastating for them,” he said. “They had absolutely no way to predict this kind of behavior.”

Linda Rosenberg, president of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, said, “The failure here is that we ignored someone for a long time who was clearly in tremendous distress.” Ms. Rosenberg, whose group is a nonprofit agency leading a campaign to teach people how to recognize and respond to signs of mental illness, added, “He wasn’t someone who could ask for help because his thinking was affected, and as a community no one said, let’s stop and make sure he gets help.”

At the University of Arizona, where a nursing student killed three instructors on campus eight years ago before killing himself, feelings of sadness and anger initially mixed with some guilt as the university examined the missed warning signs.

The overhauled process for addressing concerns is now more responsive, even if there are sometimes false alarms, said Melissa M. Vito, vice president for student affairs. “I guess I’d rather explain why I called someone’s parents than why I didn’t do something,” she said.

Many others feel the same way.

Four years ago Susan Junck watched her 18-year-old son return from community college to their Phoenix home one afternoon and, after preparing a snack, repeatedly call the police to accuse his mother of poisoning him. She assumed it was an isolated outburst, maybe connected to his marijuana use. In the coming months, though, her son’s behavior grew more alarming, culminating in an arrest for assaulting his girlfriend, who was at the center of a number of his conspiracy theories.

“I knew something was wrong but I literally just did not understand what,” Ms. Junck, 49, said in a recent interview. “It probably took a year before I realized my son has a mental illness. This isn’t drug related, this isn’t bad behavior, this isn’t teenage stuff. This is a serious mental illness.”

Fearful and desperate, she brought her son to an urgent psychiatric center and — after a five-hour wait — agreed to sign paperwork to have him involuntarily committed as a danger to himself or others. Her son screamed for her help as he was carried off. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and remains in a residential treatment facility.

This week Erin Adams Goldman, a suicide prevention specialist with a mental health nonprofit organization in Tucson, is teaching the first local installment of a course that is being promoted around the country called mental health first aid, which instructs participants how to recognize and respond to the signs of mental illness.

A central tenet is that if a person has suspicions about mental illness it is better to open the conversation, either by approaching the individual directly, someone else who knows the person well or by asking for a professional evaluation.

“There is so much fear and mystery around mental illness that people are not even aware of how to recognize it and what to do about it,” Ms. Goldman said. “But we get a feeling when something is not right. And what we teach is to follow your gut and take some action.”


A. G. Sulzberger reported from Tucson, and Benedict Carey from New York.

    Getting Someone to Psychiatric Treatment Can Be Difficult and Inconclusive, NYT, 18.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19mental.html

After Tucson, a Time for Reflection

January 18, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

“Looking Behind the Mug-Shot Grin” (front page, Jan. 16) notes that the facts suggest that the suspect in Tucson is struggling with a profound mental illness that many psychiatrists say is most likely paranoid schizophrenia.

Psychiatrists must be careful not to offer a diagnostic opinion unless they have examined the patient. This is one of the principles of medical ethics of the American Psychiatric Association.

The only good that can come out of tragedies like these is if we can prevent a recurrence of such episodes. We need to provide better education about mental illness, which can lead to earlier interventions. We need to have adequate resources for care.

For people with a severe mental illness that makes them a potential danger to themselves and others, treatments — both medications and nonpharmacological methods — work to alleviate the symptoms that lead to dangerous behaviors.

Jeffrey B. Freedman
New York, Jan. 17, 2011

The writer, a psychiatrist, is co-chairman of the public affairs committee of the New York County branch of the American Psychiatric Association.

•

To the Editor:

I truly wish that we could reduce the toxicity of our public discourse or the number of guns in the wrong hands. Since neither seems likely to happen soon, we should revisit the laws on medical privacy.

The Virginia Tech, Fort Hood and Tucson shooters all presented advance warnings, but our legal system effectively gave them more protection than it afforded their victims.

The complex and delicate balance between the rights of a dangerous individual versus the community needs some recalibration.

Adam M. Shaw
Baltimore, Jan. 13, 2011

•

To the Editor:

Over a long academic career, I have researched and written about 21 American assassins, would-be assassins and domestic terrorists. It is pure nonsense to suggest, as some have, that the political environment has nothing to do with the actions of very disturbed individuals — as Jared L. Loughner appears to be — who plan and attack political figures in public venues.

James W. Clarke
Tucson, Jan. 14, 2011

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Arizona and the author of “Defining Danger: American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists.”

•

To the Editor:

Re “From Bloody Scene to E.R., Life-Saving Choices” (front page, Jan. 15):

Before offering any further arguments in support of gun ownership, gun rights advocates should read word for word your harrowing account of the wounds suffered by the shooting victims in Tucson.

The desperate and heroic efforts of trauma surgeons as they cut open chests, plucked out broken skull pieces and plugged up bullet holes in every part of the body, literally holding the hearts and organs of patients in their hands, are evidence enough of the need to regulate access to guns in our society.

Cathy Bernard
New York, Jan. 16, 2011

•

To the Editor:

The height of irony and obscenity: the front-page photo on Sunday of people attending a gun show in Tucson, where they observed a moment of silence for the victims of the mass shooting. Have we lost our senses? Have we no shame?

Len Rosen
Brooklyn, Jan. 16, 2011

•

To the Editor:

As an activist with the pacifist left for over 40 years, I was sickened by Charles M. Blow’s assertion that “there was a giddy, almost punch-drunk excitement on the left” over the tragedy in Tucson (“The Tucson Witch Hunt,” column, Jan. 15).

Members of the American peace movement were as horrified as anyone by the violence; we cried along with the rest of the country. Believe me, there was not a single giddy person among us.

Unlike right-wingers beholden to the gun lobby, we have been steadfast in our efforts to keep our streets free of firearms, and unlike those who wield words as weapons, we have been strict in our adherence to nonviolence.

Pundits have equated reckless speech on the left and the right, despite the fact that the vitriol of the latter fills the airwaves 24 hours a day, while advocates of nonviolence and social justice have little opportunity to present our thoughtful and reasonable views to a wide audience.

Even if, as Mr. Blow contends, the left “overreacts and overreaches,” no one hears us anyway.

Wendy Schwartz
New York, Jan. 15, 2011

•

To the Editor:

I was raised in Arizona. I went to grade school, high school and college in Arizona. I was a National Park Service ranger in Arizona, and my family is still in Arizona. I know its cities and towns, and I know its people.

Or I thought I did. Over the years since I left Arizona, the people there seem to have changed, as the state has changed.

Arizona initially resisted adopting the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Armed vigilantes patrol the state’s border with Mexico.

The governor signed legislation allowing local police to demand proof of citizenship of those they stop. Arizona has been a leader in the movement to repeal the “birthright citizenship” provision of the 14th Amendment.

And the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate against Representative Gabrielle Giffords ran campaign ads showing him with an assault rifle and invited voters to join him in target practice. Many did so.

Arizonans love their guns, which are easy to buy. I often ate at a Phoenix restaurant where all the waitresses wore guns, real guns, strapped to their waists as they served you.

Like everyone, I was appalled by the tragedy in Tucson. But guns are everywhere in Arizona. Even the federal judge who was killed and Ms. Giffords owned guns.

And, as the sheriff of Pima County said in his news conference, Arizona has become “a mecca for prejudice and bigotry.” It is a volatile mix.

And I no longer know the people among whom I was raised.

Eric Leif Davin
Pittsburgh, Jan. 13, 2011

    After Tucson, a Time for Reflection, NYT, 18.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/opinion/l19arizona.html

Video Captured ‘Calculated’ Gunman in Tucson

January 18, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

TUCSON — The chief investigator for the sheriff’s department here has for the first time publicly described the brief and gory video clip from a store security camera that shows a gunman not only shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords just above the eyebrow at a range of three feet, but then using his 9-millimeter pistol to gun down others near her at a similarly close range.

The video, according to Richard Kastigar, the investigative and operational bureau chief of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, also reveals that Judge John M. Roll appears to have died while helping to save the life of Ronald Barber, a Giffords employees. Mr. Barber, who was near Ms. Giffords when he was shot twice, has left the hospital.

Mr. Kastigar said Tuesday that the video shows Ms. Giffords standing with her back a few inches from a wall when she was shot by the gunman, who approached in “a hurried fashion” with the gun at his side and then raised it and fired a single bullet above her eye at a range of no more than two or three feet.

Jared L. Loughner, 22, has been arrested in the shootings. In the video, the pistol “is down near his right side, but it is visibly out from where he was keeping it, presumably under his clothing, and then he raises it and fires,” Mr. Kastigar said. “It happens in a matter of seconds.”

The gunman “was very deliberate in my estimation, very calculated,” said Mr. Kastigar, who viewed the video as part of the extensive investigation by the Sheriff’s Department that involves close to 250 people. About 200 F.B.I. agents and analysts are also on the case. The video, he said, is now in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Describing the video, Mr. Kastigar said the judge was “intentionally trying to help Mr. Barber,” adding, “It’s very clear to me the judge was thinking of his fellow human more than himself.”

The judge guides Mr. Barber to the ground, shields him with his body, and then tries to push himself and Mr. Barber away from the gunman, who was no more than three to four feet away as he fired, Mr. Kastigar said.

“He pushes Mr. Barber with his right hand and guides him with his left hand. The judge was on top of him and is covering up Mr. Barber, literally lying on top of him, and his back was exposed,” Mr. Kastigar said.

The judge was shot in the back. Ms. Giffords remains in the hospital in serious condition, and doctors said Tuesday that she continued to improve.

In his first interview since the shooting, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, the husband of Ms. Giffords, said he had heard news reports that erroneously said she was dead. “And I just, you know, walked into the bathroom, and you know, broke down,” Captain Kelly, an astronaut, said on ABC’s “20/20,” broadcast Tuesday. He later learned at the hospital that she was still fighting for her life.

More than a dozen video clips, from cameras at the scene and the hard drive of a security system at the Safeway supermarket at the mall where the shootings occurred on Jan. 8, provide other new information about the minutes before the shootings, which left 6 dead and 13 wounded. Some were described in an article on The Washington Post’s Web site on Tuesday.

When a deputy sheriff arrived minutes after the shooting and took control of Mr. Loughner, who was being held down by two people, the deputy removed a set of earplugs from Mr. Loughner. Minutes earlier, a surveillance photo also shows Mr. Loughner inside the Safeway talking to a clerk and “pointing to his ears because he’s telling the individual that he can’t hear what she’s saying because he’s got earplugs in,” Mr. Kastigar said.

He said about 15 minutes elapsed between the time Mr. Loughner arrived by cab at the Safeway — and had to go inside to get change to pay the driver — and when the shooting started at 10:10 a.m.

The crucial video showing the shooting of Ms. Giffords, Judge Roll and Mr. Barber lasts only about five seconds before the gunman steps out of the frame.

At the start of the clip, it shows the “suspect coming from just outside of the frame of the video toward the parking lot,” Mr. Kastigar said. “He goes around a table set up for part of that gathering and walks up to Gabby and shoots her directly in the forehead.” It was not clear from this video, he said, if Ms. Giffords realized what was happening.

The gunman “then turns to his left and indiscriminately shoots at people sitting in chairs along the wall,” he said. The video does not show those people being shot, he said. But quickly the gunman is back in the video, which shows him turning to his right and shooting Mr. Barber, who had been with Judge Roll “standing side by side with the table to their backs.”

    Video Captured ‘Calculated’ Gunman in Tucson, NYT, 18.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19giffords.html

How Many Deaths Are Enough?

January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

On April 22, 2008, almost exactly one year after 32 students and faculty members were slain in the massacre at Virginia Tech, the dealer who had sold one of the weapons used by the gunman delivered a public lecture on the school’s campus. His point: that people at Virginia Tech should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus.

Eric Thompson, owner of the online firearms store that sold a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun to the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, did not think that his appearance at Virginia Tech was disrespectful or that his position was extreme. He felt so strongly that college students should be allowed to be armed while engaged in their campus activities that he offered discounts to any students who wanted to buy guns from him.

Thompson spun the discounts as altruistic. He told ABCNews.com, “This offers students and people who might not have otherwise been able to afford a weapon to purchase one at a hefty discount and at a significant expense to myself.”

The sale to Cho was not Thompson’s only unfortunate link to a mass killer. His firm sold a pair of 9-millimeter Glock magazines and a holster to Steven Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old graduate student in DeKalb, Ill., who, on the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2008, went heavily armed into an auditorium-type lecture hall at Northern Illinois University. Kazmierczak walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of students and opened fire. He killed five people and wounded 18 others before killing himself.

We’ve allowed the extremists to carry the day when it comes to guns in the United States, and it’s the dead and the wounded and their families who have had to pay the awful price. The idea of having large numbers of college students packing heat in their classrooms and at their parties and sporting events, or at the local pub or frat house or gymnasium, or wherever, is too stupid for words.

Thompson did not get a warm welcome at Virginia Tech. A spokesman for the school, Larry Hincker, said the fact that he “would set foot on this campus” was “terribly offensive” and “incredibly insensitive to the families of the victims.”

Just last week, a sophomore at Florida State University, Ashley Cowie, was shot to death accidentally by a 20-year-old student who, according to authorities, was showing off his rifle to a group of friends in an off-campus apartment complex favored by fraternity members. A second student was shot in the wrist. This occurred as state legislators in Florida are considering a proposal to allow people with permits to carry concealed weapons on campuses. The National Rifle Association thinks that’s a dandy idea.

The slaughter of college students — or anyone else — has never served as a deterrent to the gun fetishists. They want guns on campuses, in bars and taverns and churches, in parks and in the workplace, in cars and in the home. Ammunition everywhere — the deadlier, the better. A couple of years ago, a state legislator in Arizona, Karen Johnson, argued that adults needed to be able to carry guns in all schools, from elementary on up. “I feel like our kindergartners are sitting there like sitting ducks,” she said.

Can we get a grip?

The contention of those who would like college kids and just about everybody else to be armed to the teeth is that the good guys can shoot back whenever the bad guys show up to do harm. An important study published in 2009 by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine estimated that people in possession of a gun at the time of an assault were 4.5 times more likely to be shot during the assault than someone in a comparable situation without a gun.

“On average,” the researchers said, “guns did not seem to protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses can and do occur, the findings of this study do not support the perception that such successes are likely.”

Approximately 100,000 shootings occur in the United States every year. The number of people killed by guns should be enough to make our knees go weak. Monday was a national holiday celebrating the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While the gun crazies are telling us that ever more Americans need to be walking around armed, we should keep in mind that more than a million people have died from gun violence — in murders, accidents and suicides — since Dr. King was shot to death in 1968.

We need fewer homicides, fewer accidental deaths and fewer suicides. That means fewer guns. That means stricter licensing and registration, more vigorous background checks and a ban on assault weapons. Start with that. Don’t tell me it’s too hard to achieve. Just get started.

    How Many Deaths Are Enough?, NYT, 17.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18herbert.html

Makeshift Memorials Pop Up in Tucson

January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY, JENNIFER MEDINA and DENISE GRADY

This article was reported by Marc Lacey, Jennifer Medina and Denise Grady and written by Mr. Lacey.

TUCSON — There are stuffed animals of all possible species and notes written by children in crayon. There are inspiring biblical verses, photographs of the departed and candles summoning a plethora of saints. The somber, sprawling memorial outside University Medical Center has become the focal point for Tucson’s grief.

But it is not the only one. At the Safeway supermarket where a gunman opened fire on a group gathered to meet Representative Gabrielle Giffords on Jan. 8, outside the wounded congresswoman’s district office, at the entrance to the school where one victim attended third grade, makeshift memorials are popping up across this shell-shocked community.

“It’s 100 percent unorganized,” said Karen Mlawsky, the chief executive of University Medical Center, where crowds swelled into the hundreds Monday on the Martin Luther King’s Birthday holiday to honor the dead. “It’s been spontaneous, and it changes every day. Right now, there are 75 people on the lawn. Some of them are crying. Many have brought their children.”

As Tucson grieves, there are already discussions on erecting permanent memorials to the six who died. Ms. Mlawsky said the hospital intended to put up a shrine. Proposals being floating include naming a university building after one victim and a school and baseball field after another. Scholarships are being set up and food drives organized in victims’ names.

Meanwhile, everyday people are creating remembrances of their own, one bouquet of flowers or handwritten tribute at a time. “Fight Gabby Fight,” read a sign on the hospital lawn, not far scores of others that thank the doctors and lament the loss of Christina-Taylor Green, the youngest victim, and the other five who lost their lives.

“There is so little one can do after something so awful, and people feel this is something,” Jim Griffith, a retired Tucson ethnographer, said of the makeshift memorials. “Some people are trying to communicate with God or the saints or whoever they communicate with. Some want to send a message to Gabby. There are nuances of meaning that differ from person to person to person.”

Much of the outpouring is directed at Ms. Giffords, who doctors said continued to make progress after receiving a bullet wound to the head. On Saturday, she underwent surgery to repair her right eye socket, and the next major milestone in her recovery will come when she is released from the hospital into a rehabilitation center, which could be in a matter of days or weeks, doctors said.

Ms. Giffords can already breathe on her own and appeared to be focusing her eyes, a sign of progress, the doctors said. They noted that she had made it through the most dangerous period as far as potential swelling of her injured brain was concerned but that she still faced the risk of infection and other serious complications.

Her husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, a naval officer and astronaut, said in a television interview with ABC News to be broadcast Tuesday night that Ms. Giffords had rubbed his back for 10 minutes, which doctors said was another positive sign. “It does imply that she is interacting, perhaps, in a more familiar way with him,” said Dr. G. Michael Lemole Jr., the chief neurosurgeon at the hospital.

Doctors have replaced a breathing tube in Ms. Giffords’s mouth with one in her neck. They said the breathing tube would not allow her to speak because it did not allow air past her vocal cords. They said she had not yet tried to speak.

“At this time, we’re hoping to continue tying up loose ends,” Dr. Lemole said about preparing Ms. Giffords for a rehabilitation center. Hospital officials said they did not plan to hold another daily briefing about her case until Ms. Giffords was ready to leave the hospital.

Ms. Giffords’s room is not within view of the growing shrine for her and the other gunshot victims, but many of those who gather there say they long for the day she recovers enough to see how much the city has been rooting for her.

“This reminds me of Princess Diana’s memorial,” said Janie Schembri, a fifth-grade teacher who was outside the hospital Monday afternoon laying out artwork created by students at her school. “It’s beautiful, and it shows how much trauma all of us are in and how we’re searching for ways of healing.”

The School of Social Work at Arizona State University held a service Monday for Gabriel Zimmerman, an aide to Ms. Giffords who was killed in the shooting. Mr. Zimmerman graduated from the school with a master’s degree in 2006, and his friends and teachers gathered in an outdoor courtyard on the Tucson campus to remember him as an empathetic man who could connect with anyone.

Craig LeCroy, a professor at the university, proposed naming the school after Mr. Zimmerman. Others suggested donating to a scholarship that has already been created in his name for promising young students interested in public service.

On Monday, word came that another victim of the shootings had left a legacy: John Green, the father of Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old girl who was killed, said donated corneas transplanted from his daughter had saved the eyesight of two children, The Associated Press reported.

At the memorials, there is usually silence, except for an occasional sob. But then the music starts. A mariachi band has been playing for Ms. Giffords, stopping outside the hospital day after day. And on Monday, members of the Tucson Girls Chorus gathered in a circle and sang.

“We gave what we have to give, and that’s our voices,” said Marcela Molina, the artistic director. “We believe in the power of music to heal.”

Sam Dolnick contributed reporting.

    Makeshift Memorials Pop Up in Tucson, NYT, 17.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/us/18giffords.html

Shooting Suspect Had Been Known to Use Potent, and Legal, Hallucinogen

January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER and JENNIFER MEDINA

TUCSON — No one has suggested that his use of a hallucinogenic herb or any other drugs contributed to Jared L. Loughner’s apparent mental unraveling that culminated with his being charged in a devastating outburst of violence here.

Yet it is striking how closely the typical effects of smoking the herb, Salvia divinorum — which federal drug officials warn can closely mimic psychosis — matched Mr. Loughner’s own comments about how he saw the world, like his often-repeated assertion that he spent most of his waking hours in a dream world that he had learned to control.

Salvia is a potent but legal drug marketed with promises of producing a transcendental spiritual journey: out-of-body experiences, existence in multiple realities, the revelation of secret knowledge and, according to one online seller, “permanent mind-altering change in perception.”

Mr. Loughner, 22, was at one point a frequent user of the plant, also known as diviner’s sage, which he began smoking while in high school during a time in which he was also experimenting with marijuana, hallucinogenic mushrooms and other drugs, according to friends. Mental health professionals warn that drug use can both aggravate and mask the onset of mental illness.

“He always had it on him,” said George Osler IV, whose son, Zach, was good friends with Mr. Loughner in high school. It is unclear when Mr. Loughner last used the drug.

It remains unclear what, if any, role salvia played in shaping Mr. Loughner’s views. But the shootings have once again drawn attention to a drug that — for little more than the cost of a pack of cigarettes and without the hassle of showing a driver’s license — a growing number of young people here and throughout much of the country are legally buying and using.

“It’s a draw for adventure seekers — the people who are attracted to the sort of bungee-jumping attempt in psychopharmacology,” said Matthew W. Johnson, a professor of behavioral pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University medical school, who has studied the effect of the drug on humans. “They are looking for that sort of thing as a part of their belief system. Sometimes they are extremely compelled by what they are experiencing.”

A perennial in the mint family related to the ornamental plant popular with gardeners, Salvia divinorum is native to Mexico and has historically been used by Mazatec shamans in religious rituals, where the large green leaves are chewed or made into a tea. (Some researchers have said the herb holds promise for developing new medicine to control pain and treat drug addiction.)

Smoked, the effect is shorter and more intense, typically lasting just a few minutes.

People who have smoked the herb say the experience is often unpleasant, and many never use it again. The powerful effects have been documented in thousands of online videos documenting experiences on the drug — including a recent video of the teenage music and television star Miley Cyrus laughing hysterically and babbling nonsensically after smoking the drug. Nearly 6 percent of high school seniors and college students reported using the drug in the previous year, a higher percentage than used Ecstasy or cocaine and more than twice as much as LSD, according to a federal survey released in 2009.

“It pretty much puts you in a different world,” said Casey Hazelton, 19, describing his own experience with the drug while visiting a local smoke shop that sells packets of the herb. “It’s like you’re dreaming if you’re awake.”

Nationwide, poison centers treated 117 Salvia divinorum exposures in 2010, up from 81 the year before.

Salvia’s growing popularity has led nearly half the states to ban or restrict the sale of the herb, which is often treated with concentrated extract of the active chemical to make it more powerful. The push coincides with recent efforts by states around the country to outlaw a number of other legal drugs that often sit alongside salvia on the shelves that use chemical additives to mimic the effects of illegal drugs like marijuana.

“It’s an issue that the states are increasingly paying attention to,” said Alison Lawrence, policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Arizona, however, salvia and other synthetic drugs like Spice and K2 can legally be sold to anyone, including minors, and are available at smoke shops, liquor stores and even grocery stores. The drug is also widely sold on the Internet with more potent versions accompanied by warnings like “reality is ripped to shreds.”

Eric Meyer, a doctor and member of the Arizona Legislature, has introduced bills each of the past two years to restrict the sale of salvia to those 21 and older (three states, including California, have age restrictions). Both years the bill died without coming to a final vote. Mr. Meyer said he planned to introduce the legislation again next week, with the hope that the increased attention would allow the bill to go forward.

“It’s a first step to get some control over the drug,” he said.

The Drug Enforcement Agency has listed salvia as a drug of concern and is considering classifying it as a Schedule I drug, like LSD or marijuana, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Michael Luo contributed reporting.

    Shooting Suspect Had Been Known to Use Potent, and Legal, Hallucinogen, NYT, 17.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/us/18salvia.html

Palin Defends Use of ‘Blood Libel’ Phrase

January 17, 2011
9:59 pm
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON – Sarah Palin said in a television interview on Monday evening that she agreed with bipartisan calls for civility in the wake of the Arizona shooting rampage, but she vowed to not be deterred from political debates while deciding whether to run for president.

“Peaceful dissent and discussion about ideas, that is what makes America exceptional,” Ms. Palin said in a prime-time appearance on the Fox News Channel. “We won’t allow that to be stifled by a tragic event in Arizona.”

Ms. Palin, a former Alaska governor, said that she had not yet decided what course her political future would take, but declared: “I’m not going to sit down. I’m not going to shut up.”
www.foxnews.com Sarah Palin was interviewed by Sean Hannity, a Fox host, on Monday.

In her first television interview since the Arizona shooting, Ms. Palin defended using the term “blood libel” to describe what she perceived as a rush to judgment by her critics for drawing a link between heated political rhetoric and the shooting that killed six people and wounded 14, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. She dismissed suggestions that she did not know the historical significance of the phrase.

“Blood libel obviously means being falsely accused of having blood on your hands and in this case,” Ms. Palin said, “that’s exactly what was going on.”

The 30-minute interview with Sean Hannity, a Fox host, came five days after Ms. Palin was criticized by Democrats and several Republicans for a video message she released in the wake of the Arizona shooting rampage. Her tone was conciliatory throughout the interview, and she repeatedly pointed out that she was not attempting to engage in an act of political self-defense.

“This isn’t about me,” Ms. Palin said, speaking from a television studio in her home in Wasilla, Alaska. “My defense wasn’t self-defense, it was defending those who were falsely accused.”

Ms. Palin expressed her condolences to the victims of the shooting. She recited a Bible verse from the Book of Jeremiah, asking that God touch and comfort the families. She acknowledged that she and her family receives death threats, but she offered no specific details.

Ms. Palin, who is a paid Fox analyst, has been uncharacteristically quiet since the shooting. Several Republicans had urged Ms. Palin to come forward and join the national conversation over political civility that has been underway for more than a week.
In the midterm elections last year, Ms. Palin used a map with cross hairs over several swing Congressional districts, which Ms. Giffords, whose district was among those singled out, highlighted at the time as an example of overheated political speech. Ms. Palin has rejected suggestions that the map played any role in the shooting. The authorities have found no connection between vitriolic political rhetoric and the motive of the gunman.

As the field of potential 2012 Republican presidential contenders begins taking shape, Ms. Palin has given few signals about whether she intends to enter the race. Republican officials in early primary states say that Ms. Palin is one of the few prospective candidates who has not inquired – even privately – about scheduling a political visit.

Ms. Palin is scheduled to deliver a keynote speech on Jan. 29 at a Safari Club hunting convention on Jan. 29.

The television appearance on Monday evening provided a friendly venue for Ms. Palin to address the criticism that erupted in the last week. As the interview drew to a close, Mr. Hannity asked Ms. Palin whether the controversy had caused long-term damage to her political career.

“In a situation like we have just faced in these last eight days of being falsely accused of being an accessory to murder, I and others need make sure that we too are shedding light on truth so a lie cannot continue to live,” Ms. Palin said. “If a lie does live, then of course your career is over and your reputation is thrashed and you will be ineffective in what we intend to do.”

    Palin Defends Use of ‘Blood Libel’ Phrase, NYT, 17.1.2011, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/palin-defends-use-of-blood-libel-phrase/

After Tucson, Blanket Accusations Leave Much to Interpretation

January 16, 2011
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS and BRIAN STELTER

FOR every action in politics today, there’s an overwhelming and opposite reaction.

Last week, the reaction came from conservative politicians who bridled at suggestions in the media that Jared L. Loughner may have been influenced by right-wing rhetoric and talk radio when he killed six people and gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a rampage on Jan. 8 in Tucson. In her video address on Wednesday, Sarah Palin said that journalists and pundits should not manufacture “a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.”

The question left unanswered: which journalists and pundits?

While there was plenty of debate in newspapers, and on radio and television about the effects of a toxic politic environment, most of the direct accusations against conservative talk radio and pundits were leveled by people online, not members of the mainstream media.

Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC host and reliable bête noire of conservative pundits, used the opportunity to recall his own use of a violent image when describing the candidacy of then-Senator Hillary Clinton: “It sounded as if it was a call to physical violence. It was wrong then. It is even more wrong tonight. I apologize for it again, and I urge politicians and commentators and citizens of every political conviction to use my comment as a means to recognize the insidiousness of violent imagery.”

But on the Web, where anonymity often reigns, the blame game was much more pointed. In The Huffington Post, Gary Hart wrote about attacks on liberals and concluded that “today we have seen the results of this rhetoric.”

On Ms. Palin’s Facebook wall, thousands of supporters and detractors argued about whether she and other right-wing voices had any culpability in the shootings. Conservatives denounced Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal blog Daily Kos, for writing on Twitter, “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin” and linking to the bull’s-eye map that featured Ms. Giffords’s district.

Tim McGuire, who teaches at the Arizona State University Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said that accusations against the media result in part from confusion about how to define the media in the digital age.

“I don’t see that the mainstream media has been pointing fingers or coming to conclusions about who is to blame. I think they’ve reported,” Mr. McGuire said. “You can talk about the fact that there has been certain legislation in Arizona and that people have used vitriolic language around target practice and the like. You can talk about those things without citing a cause-and-effect relationship. But I see very few mainstream media operatives trying to draw a cause and effect.”

But, Mr. McGuire added, “I think there was some of that on social media, some were trying to do that. But that’s the nature of social media: citizens expressing their opinion.”

One of the first people to raise the issue was not even a member of the media: Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik suggested that “vitriolic rhetoric” on radio and television was hurting America. His first statement contained no references to any single political figure, cable network or radio personality.

But his subsequent remarks, in which he called Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators “irresponsible,” ignited wrath from the right. The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer called Mr. Dupnik, a Democrat, and liberal pundits, “rabid partisans.” Ann Coulter, the conservative author and columnist, called him “Sheriff Dumbnik.” Mr. Limbaugh called him a fool.

Andrew Tyndall, who analyzes network newscasts for his newsletter, the Tyndall Report, said he thought Mr. Dupnik’s media critique overreached. “Of course” conservative rhetoric “should be more moderate,” he wrote Wednesday, but “linking such language to these killings, by making such over-the-top hypotheses about their influence, makes the mistake of elevating its speakers to a status of self-righteous victimhood.”

Commentators on the right were quick to condemn their perennial adversaries, including The New York Times, for drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between overheated political rhetoric and the shootings.

“Besides the senseless violence, there is another disgusting display sweeping America, and that is the exploitation of the murders by political zealots,” Bill O’Reilly opened his show on Monday night. “The merchants of hate who are peddling this stuff should be accountable. So let’s begin with The New York Times.”

Mr. O’Reilly went on to cite a column by the Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman and a Times editorial as evidence that The Times and others were blaming Sarah Palin for the killings and portraying those on the right as “accessories to murder.”

The Times editorial did not actually blame the right for Mr. Loughner’s actions, saying, “It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members.” Mr. O’Reilly, who did not read that sentence on the air, did read the section of the editorial that said “But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger” that has produced an increase in the number of threats toward members of Congress and the judiciary.

On his program Wednesday, Mr. Limbaugh said he was home alone watching a football game Saturday afternoon when the shooting took place.

“I hadn’t been to Tucson, Ariz., in 20 years, and all of a sudden, I read it’s my fault, and I’m hearing people say it’s my fault and that it’s inspired by me and what I do,” he said.

Mr. Limbaugh’s name was uttered only twice on cable television over the weekend, according to a search of the closed-captioning records of the channels. Those two times came on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” a media criticism program. Google Blog Search shows no blog posts over the weekend directly blaming Mr. Limbaugh, either.

Liberal Web sites lighted up later in the week when a photo turned up of a billboard in Tucson promoting Mr. Limbaugh’s show with the tagline “straight shooter” and an array of illustrated bullet holes. The billboard was quickly taken down, and Mr. Limbaugh had a field day with it on his show Friday. The illustration, he said, made it look like “somebody had been shooting at the billboard, meaning angry liberals.”

    After Tucson, Blanket Accusations Leave Much to Interpretation, NYT, 16.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/business/media/17media.html

Lawmakers Aiming to Increase Civility

January 16, 2011
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — A leader of the Senate Democrats and one of the Senate’s most conservative Republicans will sit together at the State of the Union speech next week in a gesture of unity.

A House Republican from Pennsylvania and a House Democrat from California said Sunday that they would work together to revisit federal and state laws on mental illness.

And the House speaker, John A. Boehner, used the phrase “job-destroying” instead of “job-killing” in reference to the Democrats’ health care overhaul in a speech to colleagues on Saturday — a subtle but pointed shift in tone, though not in substance.

As the House prepares to resume regular legislative business on Tuesday, the shooting in Arizona that killed six in a failed assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords has shifted the political dynamic in Washington and across the nation, with lawmakers embracing a new civility.

No one is suggesting that the fierce policy disagreements will disappear or that old animosities will not remain just beneath the new, courteous veneer. But lawmakers said they expected a leveling of the discourse on even the most divisive issues, like cutting spending, whether to raise the federal debt limit and the Republican measure to repeal the Democrats’ health care overhaul, which the House is set to vote on this week.

“I think the tenor on anything that happens in the House is going to be a little different,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 House Republican, told reporters at a Republican retreat that ended on Saturday in Baltimore.

Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said there was no retreat from a policy standpoint. “I think you’ll see a more civil debate than you would have had otherwise,” Mr. Flake said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “I’m not sure the substance of the debate will change that much.”

Of course, any change in the way lawmakers debate issues or interact with one another on the floor could be as short-lived as a 30-second ad in a primary campaign. And Republicans in the 112th Congress, newly in control of the House and a stronger force in the Senate, said they would still fight to undo much of the legislation that emerged from the 111th, in which Democrats held sway in both chambers.

But in interviews and television appearances over the weekend, lawmakers in both parties voiced clear recognition that the Arizona massacre has put them on notice that it is time to dial down the rhetoric with which they publicly express differences — even as many reiterated a belief that the gunman’s mental illness, not heated political rhetoric, was the core issue in the shooting.

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat, and Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, a leading conservative, said Sunday that they would sit together at the State of the Union speech. The gesture, expected to be replicated by colleagues, stands to alter the seemingly timeless image of lawmakers on one side of the House chamber standing and applauding a president from their own party, while lawmakers on the other side sit stone-faced, their hands in their laps.

The centrist Democratic group Third Way initially proposed bipartisan seating at the president’s annual address on Jan. 25, and Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, urged members of Congress to embrace the idea, which Mr. Schumer said prompted him to reach out to Mr. Coburn.

“We hope that many others will follow us,” Mr. Schumer said, appearing with Mr. Coburn on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “Now, that’s symbolic, but maybe it just sets a tone and everything gets a little bit more civil.”

Mr. Schumer added: “We believe in discourse in America. We believe in strenuous discourse. We don’t sweep differences under the rug.

“Tom and I have real differences. But we can do it civilly. I will say, to Tom’s credit, we have disagreed on a whole lot of stuff, but he’s always been civil, he’s always been a gentleman. And that’s an example that people should follow — politicians and the media.”

Mr. Coburn said that the news media had focused too much on political rancor and that lawmakers on both sides simply needed to settle down to work. “Some of the problems in our country is we talk past each other, not to each other,” he said. “And Chuck and I have been able to work on multiple bills because we sit down, one on one, and work things out. And what we need to do is have more of that, not less of it.”

Among the potential issues to be addressed are gaps in laws intended to prevent those who are mentally ill or abuse drugs from buying guns.

Mr. Coburn noted that many questions had been raised about the mental state of Jared L. Loughner, the man accused in the Tucson attack, but that Mr. Loughner had never been brought to the attention of mental health authorities who might have prevented him from buying a weapon.

“Let’s fix the real problem,” Mr. Coburn, a strong proponent of gun rights, said, adding, “I’m willing to work with Senator Schumer and anybody else that wants to make sure people who are mentally ill cannot get and use a gun.”

Noting that Mr. Loughner had been rejected from the Army because of excessive drug use, Mr. Schumer said the drug use would have prevented him by law from buying a gun.

“But the law doesn’t require the military to notify the F.B.I. about that, and in this case they didn’t,” he said.

Mr. Schumer said he had written a letter to the Obama administration on Sunday urging that the military be required to notify the F.B.I. when it rejects someone for drug use and that that information be added to the F.B.I. database.

Representative Tim Murphy, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Representative Grace F. Napolitano, Democrat of California, who jointly founded the Congressional Mental Health Caucus, said they hoped to lead colleagues in revisiting state and federal policies related to mental illness.

“I believe this issue has touched the hearts of so many members of Congress, who are constantly stopping me and saying: ‘Is there something else we could have done? Is there something else we can do?’ ” Mr. Murphy said. “And I believe so.”

While Mr. Murphy and Ms. Napolitano are veteran lawmakers, some lawmakers said they saw potential for changing the culture of Congress, given the large number of freshmen — including 87 new Republicans — who do not have hard feelings or grudges from mistreatment during their days in the minority.

“This is a serious group,” said Representative Peter Roskam of Illinois, the chief deputy Republican whip, “and I think they are going to easily rise above some of the past injuries and sharp elbows and come with an expectation that the House of Representatives is going to convene to accomplish something rather than just settle old scores.”

As he adjusts to life in the House, one of those freshman, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, said he thought the shooting of Ms. Giffords had served to remind House members what they share with those in the other party.

“There will still be passion here,” he said. “But it has kind of humanized us to each other.”

    Lawmakers Aiming to Increase Civility, NYT, 16.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/politics/17cong.html

Husband’s Message About Giffords: ‘She’s a Fighter’

January 16, 2011
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article is by Michael Luo, Sam Dolnick and Jennifer Medina.

TUCSON — On a day when Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s condition was upgraded to serious from critical, her husband, Mark Kelly, spoke publicly for the first time on Sunday. He left his wife’s hospital bedside to take the stage at a memorial service for Gabriel Zimmerman, an aide who was killed in the shooting rampage that left Ms. Giffords grievously wounded.

Mr. Kelly told the several hundred mourners gathered in the courtyard at the Tucson Museum of Art that he had just come from the hospital and that his wife was “improving a little bit each day. She’s a fighter.”

“I know someday she’ll get to tell you how she felt about Gabe herself,” Mr. Kelly said.

His wife loved Mr. Zimmerman “like a younger brother,” he said, and was inspired by “his idealism, his strength and his warmth.”

At almost the exact same time, about a half-hour’s drive east, another shooting victim — Dorwan Stoddard, 76, known as Dory to friends — was eulogized at a church filled with hundreds of mourners.

“There are no monuments to Dory, there are no streets named after him,” said the Rev. Mike Nowak, his pastor. “He was just an ordinary man. He did not become a hero that day — he was a hero every day of his life.”

At University Medical Center, officials said on Sunday that Ms. Giffords’s condition was upgraded because she was no longer on a ventilator. Doctors announced on Saturday that they placed a tracheotomy tube in Ms. Giffords’s throat as a precautionary measure.

“The congresswoman continues to do well,” a spokeswoman said in a statement. “She is breathing on her own. Yesterday’s procedures were successful and uneventful.”

Jared L. Loughner, the man charged in the shooting that left six dead and 13 wounded, is in the custody of federal marshals at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, which houses almost 1,100 prisoners about 25 miles north of downtown.

According to an official familiar with the prison, Mr. Loughner, who federal records say is registered as inmate No. 15213-196, is being held in “segregation” for his own protection. Prisoners in segregation are closely monitored, the official said, and generally spend 23 hours of the day alone in their cells and have an hour or so a day for exercise and showering.

Mr. Loughner, 22, has no contact with other prisoners, said the official, who added that the prison’s past inmates included Salvatore Gravano, the Mafia informer and hit man known as Sammy the Bull.

The funerals on Sunday marked the fourth and fifth for victims of the shooting, leaving just one remaining, that of Dorothy Morris, 76, whose husband, George, remains hospitalized after the shooting. A date has not yet been set, said Bill Royle, a family friend, because it depends in part on Mr. Morris’s recovery.

On this cool, sunny day, it seemed as though this reeling community, despite the tears, had finally begun to slip back into a semblance of its former rhythms, as the horde of news media that descended upon the city finally began to pack up and leave.

Grocery carts trundled through the aisles at the Safeway where the shooting occurred, though shoppers continued to pause and reflect in front of a makeshift memorial outside. The neighborhood where Mr. Loughner lived with his parents, Randy and Amy, was quiet on Sunday afternoon, with nary a satellite truck in sight.

About 300 people gathered at a midtown park on Sunday morning and marched about two miles to Ms. Giffords’s district office in what organizers called a “walk for peace” to honor the victims of the shooting.

The event was the brainchild of Amanda Lopez, 23, and Amanda Hutchison, 20, who had been grappling with how respond to the rampage, ultimately coming up with the idea of the peace walk.

Some marchers carried babies in slings or pushed strollers, others walked their dogs. To avoid politicizing the event, the organizers decided not to allow anyone to hold signs, but distributed yellow ribbons to commemorate the victims.

“It’s time for people to reflect, for the city of Tucson and the rest of the country to come together and reflect,” said Yvette Patterson, 42, who was among the marchers. “It’s important that we really see the humanity in each other. If we don’t start to lower our barriers, maybe we could get torn apart.”

When the crowd reached a collection of tributes outside Ms. Giffords’s office, a woman began singing “Amazing Grace.” Others in the crowd softly sang along.

The effects of the shooting, like pebbles in a pond, continued to ripple on Sunday, as one of the 13 people wounded spent the day in a mental health center by police order.

The wounded person, J. Eric Fuller, 63, a military veteran, was arrested on Saturday after disrupting a forum being taped for broadcast by ABC News. He was said to have blurted out “You’re dead” to Trent Humphries, the founder of the Tucson Tea Party, who was speaking.

Mr. Fuller had showed flashes of anger, railing against the “Tea Party crime syndicate” in an interview with The New York Times in the early days after the shooting.

He was being held for a 72-hour mental health evaluation, said Jason Ogan, a spokesman for the Pima County sheriff’s office.

The sheriff’s office forwarded charges of threats, intimidation and disorderly conduct against Mr. Fuller to the county attorney’s office, Mr. Ogan said.

At Mr. Zimmerman’s service, Mr. Kelly, an astronaut who is supposed to lead the crew of the shuttle Endeavour this spring on its final mission, spoke for several minutes. He was one of a long train of speakers that included childhood friends, relatives and staff members in Ms. Giffords’s office.

As Ms. Giffords’s director of community outreach, Mr. Zimmerman helped prepare for the “Congress on Your Corner” event at the Safeway on Jan. 8. He arrived early, as he often did. When Ms. Giffords was shot, Mr. Zimmerman, 30, was standing nearby and lunged to help her.

He was remembered on Sunday as a passionate idealist, able to put anyone at ease, dedicating his life to helping others.

He proposed to his girlfriend last summer while on a 5 a.m. run through the mountains. He was addicted to diet sodas. He was so good with angry callers that his nickname in the office was “The Constituent Whisperer.”

Ron Barber, another of Ms. Giffords’s aides who was shot in the attack, took the stage with the help of a walker. He said Mr. Zimmerman was a genius at connecting with people from across the political and social spectrums.

“He had the integrity, he had the heart, he had the personality,” Mr. Barber said.

The story of Mr. Stoddard, mourned at the day’s other funeral, has become part of the tragedy’s lore. When the gunfire erupted, Mr. Stoddard knocked down his wife, Mavy, and threw his body on top of hers to protect her. Mrs. Stoddard was shot three times in the leg but was released from the hospital last week.

As the service was about to end, Mrs. Stoddard went to the microphone, wearing a red jacket and sitting in a wheelchair. Her hands shaking but her voice strong and firm, she said: “I am the woman who was married to this man. He loved God, and he loved me, and spoiled me rotten.”

A wave of laughter went through the audience. “The journey will be very, very difficult, but he died for me, and I must live for him,” she said.

“I will survive,” she added. “We will not let that gunman take that away.”

Richard A. Oppel Jr., Joseph Goldstein and Anissa Tanweer contributed reporting.

    Husband’s Message About Giffords: ‘She’s a Fighter’, NYT, 16.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/17giffords.html

Arizona, in the Classroom

January 16, 2011
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Last week’s memorial service in Tucson, which began with a blessing by a professor of Yaqui Indian and Mexican heritage, showcased Arizona’s rich diversity as well as the love and tolerance of many of its citizens.

Unfortunately there is another Arizona, one where its state government all too often promotes discord and intolerance. This was painfully clear in the state’s immigration law, which empowers the police to demand the papers of suspected illegal immigrants. And it is painfully clear in a new education law that injects nativist fears directly into the public school classroom.

The law, which took effect Dec. 31, bans any courses or classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Arizona’s new attorney general, Tom Horne, immediately used it to declare illegal a Mexican-American ethnic-studies program in the Tucson Unified School District.

Mr. Horne, who wrote the law when he was superintendent of public instruction, accused the program of “brainwashing” Latino students, of teaching “ethnic chauvinism” because it uses works by authors critical of the United States’ historical relationship with Latin America and its past treatment of Latinos. He has not gone after similar programs for black, Asian or American Indian students.

It’s hard to object to the portions of the law that discourage the overthrow of the government. But Mr. Horne goes way overboard in trying keep high school students from studying works like Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a classic educational text, or any effort to deepen students’ understanding of history, and their place in the world. Tucson school officials say that far from stoking teenage resentment, the program has helped students keep their grades up and stay in school.

The school district has been put in a bind: shut the program down or lose state financing. Eleven teachers have sued to block the law. The school board, regrettably, did not join the lawsuit.

Educators and parents across the state should resist this effort to clamp down on education. Justice demands it. And even this ill-considered law suggests that Mr. Horne has badly overreached. One passage reads: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to restrict or prohibit the instruction of the Holocaust, any other instance of genocide, or the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, race or class.”

Arizona was rightly criticized in the 1980s and early 90’s when it refused to join the nation in declaring Martin Luther King’s Birthday a holiday. It finally agreed in 1992, and the whole country has since traveled closer toward racial harmony. Arizona’s political leaders shame themselves and their citizens when they preach and promote the opposite.

    Arizona, in the Classroom, NYT, 16.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17mon2.html

Looking Behind the Mug-Shot Grin of an Accused Killer

January 15, 2011
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article was reported by Jo Becker, Serge F. Kovaleski, Michael Luo and Dan Barry and written by Mr. Barry.

TUCSON — Moments after the swirl of panic, blood, death and shock, the suspect was face down on the pavement and squirming under the hold of two civilians, his shaved head obscured by a beanie and the hood of his dark sweatshirt.

Deputy Sheriff Thomas Audetat, a chiseled former Marine with three tours in Iraq to his credit, dug his knee into the gangly young man’s back and cuffed him. With the aid of another deputy, he relieved the heroic civilians of their charge and began searching for weapons other than the Glock semiautomatic pistol, secured nearby under a civilian’s foot, that had just fired 31 rounds.

In the left front pocket, two 15-round magazines. In the right front pocket, a black, four-inch folding knife. “Are there any other weapons on you?” Deputy Audetat recalled demanding.

“Back right pocket.”

But the back right pocket contained no weapons. Instead, in a Ziploc bag, the deputy found about $20 in cash, some change, a credit card and, peeking through the plastic as if proffering a calling card, an Arizona driver’s license for one Jared Lee Loughner, 22.

Deputy Audetat lifted the passive, even relaxed suspect to his feet and led him to the patrol car, where the man twisted himself awkwardly across the back seat, face planted on the floor board. Then he invoked an oddly timed constitutional right. “I plead the Fifth,” Mr. Loughner said, though the deputy had no intention of questioning him. “I plead the Fifth.”

At a Pima County Sheriff’s Department substation, Deputy Audetat guided Mr. Loughner to a tiny interview room with a two-way mirror, directed him to a plastic blue chair and offered him a glass of water. The deputy detected no remorse; nothing.

Now to another building for the mug shot. Look into the camera, the suspect was told. He smiled.

Click.

Mr. Loughner’s spellbinding mug shot — that bald head, that bright-eyed gaze, that smile — yields no answer to why, why, why, why, the aching question cried out in a subdued Tucson synagogue last week. Does the absence of hair suggest a girding for battle? Does the grin convey a sense of accomplishment, or complete disengagement from the consequence of his actions?

And is his slightly blackened left eye all but winking at the wholesale violence that preceded the camera’s click? The attack on a meet-and-greet event with a congresswoman outside a supermarket; the killing of six people, including the chief federal judge in Arizona and a 9-year-old girl; the wounding of 13, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, shot in the head.

Since last Saturday’s shooting frenzy in Tucson, investigators and the news media have spent the week frantically trying to assemble the Jared Loughner jigsaw puzzle in hopes that the pieces will fit, a clear picture will emerge and the answer to why will be found, providing the faint reassurance of a dark mystery solved.

Instead, the pattern of facts so far presents only a lack of one, a curlicue of contradictory moments open to broad interpretation. Here he is, a talented saxophonist with a prestigious high school jazz band, and there he is, a high school dropout. Here he is, a clean-cut employee for an Eddie Bauer store, and there he is, so unsettling a presence that tellers at a local bank would feel for the alarm button when he walked in.

Those who see premeditation in the acts Mr. Loughner is accused of committing can cite, for example, his pleading of the Fifth Amendment or the envelope the authorities found in his safe that bore the handwritten words “Giffords,” “My assassination” and “I planned ahead” — or how he bided his time in the supermarket, even using the men’s room. Those who suspect he is insane, and therefore a step removed from being responsible for his actions, can point to any of his online postings, including:

“If 987,123,478,961,876,341,234,671,234, 098,601,978,618 is the year in B.C.E then the previous year of 987,123,478,961,876, 341,234,671,234,098,601,978,618 B.C.E is 987,123,478,961,876,341,234,671,234,098, 601,978,619 B.C.E.”

What the cacophony of facts do suggest is that Mr. Loughner is struggling with a profound mental illness (most likely paranoid schizophrenia, many psychiatrists say); that his recent years have been marked by stinging rejection — from his country’s military, his community college, his girlfriends and, perhaps, his father; that he, in turn, rejected American society, including its government, its currency, its language, even its math. Mr. Loughner once declared to his professor that the number 6 could be called 18.

As he alienated himself from his small clutch of friends, grew contemptuous of women in positions of power and became increasingly oblivious to basic social mores, Mr. Loughner seemed to develop a dreamy alternate world, where the sky was sometimes orange, the grass sometimes blue and the Internet’s informational chaos provided refuge.

He became an echo chamber for stray ideas, amplifying, for example, certain grandiose tenets of a number of extremist right-wing groups — including the need for a new money system and the government’s mind-manipulation of the masses through language.

In the last three months, Mr. Loughner had a 9-millimeter bullet tattooed on his right shoulder blade and turned increasingly to the Internet to post indecipherable tutorials about the new currency, bemoan the prevalence of illiteracy and settle scores with the Army and Pima Community College, both of which had shunned him. He also may have felt rejected by the American government in general, and by Ms. Giffords in particular, with whom he had a brief — and, to him, unsatisfactory — encounter in 2007.

Nearly four years later, investigators say, Mr. Loughner methodically planned another encounter with her. Eight days ago, on a sunny Saturday morning, he took a $14 taxi ride to a meet-your-representative gathering outside a Safeway, they say, and he was armed for slaughter.

Clarence Dupnik, the outspoken sheriff of Pima County, was driving back from Palm Springs when he received word of the shooting. Ms. Giffords and the slain judge, John M. Roll, were friends of his. “It was like someone kicked me in the stomach,” he recalled. “Shock turned to anger. The closer to Tucson, the angrier I got.”

Although his law enforcement colleagues are diligently working to shore up their criminal case to counter a possible plea of insanity that could mitigate punishment, Sheriff Dupnik seems torn about Mr. Loughner’s mental state.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the whole trial will be about did he know right from wrong,” the sheriff said. “We’ll have 15 psychiatrists saying yes. We’ll have 15 psychiatrists saying no. What do I say? I think he’s mentally disturbed.”

Disturbed enough to be found guilty but insane?

“I majored in psychology at the university,” Sheriff Dupnik answered. “Based on what I’ve seen, he is psychotic, he has serious problems with reality, and I think he’s delusional. Does he meet the legal test of guilty but insane? I don’t know.”

Early Signs of Alienation

One spring morning in 2006, a student showed up at Mountain View High School so intoxicated that he had to be taken to Northwest Hospital, five miles away. A sheriff’s deputy went to the hospital’s emergency room to question the inebriated 17-year-old student, whose eyes were red from crying.

According to a police report, the teenager explained that he had taken a bottle of vodka from his father’s liquor cabinet around 1:30 that morning and, for the next several hours, drank much of its contents. Why? Because I was upset that my father had yelled at me, said the student, Jared Loughner.

In the search for clues to explain the awfulness to come, this moment stands out as the first public breach in the facade of domestic calm in the modest Loughner home on Soledad Avenue in the modest subdivision of Orangewood Estates, its front door shrouded by the wide canopy of an old mesquite tree, its perimeter walled off as if for fortification.

The mother, Amy Loughner, worked as the manager of one of the area’s parks. Pleasant though reserved, she impressed the parents of her son’s friends as a doting mother who shepherded her only child to his saxophone lessons and concerts, and encouraged his dream of one day attending the Juilliard School, the prestigious arts conservatory in New York.

Once, when he was in the ninth grade, Mr. Loughner’s parents had to leave town for a week, and he stayed with the family of his friend, Alex Montanaro. Before leaving, Mrs. Loughner presented Alex’s mother, Michelle Montanaro, with a document that temporarily granted her power of attorney for Jared — in case something happened.

“This is how I knew his mom doted on Jared,” Ms. Montanaro said. “She thought of everything for her son.”

But the father, Randy Loughner, was so rarely mentioned by his son that some of Jared’s friends assumed that his parents were divorced. Mr. Loughner installed carpets and pool decks, and spent much of his free time restoring old cars. Jared drove a Chevy Nova; his mother, an El Camino.

Some neighbors saw Randy Loughner as private; others as standoffish, even a bit scary. As a member of one neighboring family suggested: if your child’s ball came to rest in the Loughners’ yard, you left it there.

And, occasionally, word would trickle back to the homes of Jared’s friends of a family unhappy in its own way. That Jared and his father did not get along. That a palpable sense of estrangement hovered in the Loughner home.

“He would tell me that he didn’t want to go home because he didn’t like being home,” recalled Ashley Figueroa, 21, who dated him for several months in high school.

Teased for a while as a Harry Potter look-alike, then adopting a more disheveled look, Jared seemed to find escape for a while in music, developing a taste for the singular sounds of John Coltrane and Charlie Parker. A talented saxophonist, he could show off his own musical chops by sweetly performing such jazz classics as “Summertime.”

He belonged to the Arizona Jazz Academy, where the director, Doug Tidaback, found him to be withdrawn, though clearly dedicated. He played for two different ensembles, an 18-piece band and a smaller combo, which meant four hours of rehearsal on weekends and many discussions between the director and the mother about her son’s musical prospects.

But Mr. Tidaback did not recall ever seeing Jared’s father at any of the rehearsals or performances. And one other thing: the music director suspected that the teenager might be using marijuana.

“Being around people who smoke pot, they tend to be a little paranoid,” Mr. Tidaback said. “I got that sense from him. That might have been part of his being withdrawn.”

Mr. Tidaback, it seems, was onto something. Several of Jared’s friends said he used marijuana, mushrooms and, especially, the hallucinogenic herb called Salvia divinorum. When smoked or chewed, the plant can cause brief but intense highs.

None of this necessarily distinguished him from his high school buddies. Several of them dabbled in drugs, played computer games like World of Warcraft and Diablo and went through Goth and alternative phases. Jared and a friend, Zane Gutierrez, would also shoot guns for practice in the desert; Jared, Mr. Gutierrez recalled, became quite proficient at picking off can targets with a gun.

But Jared, a curious teenager who at times could be intellectually intimidating, stood out because of his passionate opinions about government — and his obsession with dreams.

He became intrigued by antigovernment conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 attacks were perpetrated by the government and that the country’s central banking system was enslaving its citizens. His anger would well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government.

“I think he feels the people should be able to govern themselves,” said Ms. Figueroa, his former girlfriend. “We didn’t need a higher authority.”

Breanna Castle, 21, another friend from junior and senior high school, agreed. “He was all about less government and less America,” she said, adding, “He thought it was full of conspiracies and that the government censored the Internet and banned certain books from being read by us.”

Among the books that he would later cite as his favorites: “Animal Farm,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Mein Kampf” and “The Communist Manifesto.” Also: “Peter Pan.”

And there was that fascination with dreams. Ms. Castle acknowledged that in high school, she too developed an interest in analyzing her dreams. But Jared’s interest was much deeper.

“It started off with dream interpretation, but then he delved into the idea of accessing different parts of your mind and trying to control your entire brain at all times,” she said. “He was troubled that we only use part of our brain, and he thought that he could unlock his entire brain through lucid dreaming.”

With “lucid dreaming,” the dreamer supposedly becomes aware that he or she is dreaming and then is able to control those dreams. George Osler IV, the father of one of Jared’s former friends, said his son explained the notion to him this way: “You can fly. You can experience all kinds of things that you can’t experience in reality.”

But the Mr. Osler worried about the healthiness of this boyhood obsession, particularly the notion that “This is all not real.”

Gradually, friends and acquaintances say, there came a detachment from the waking world — a strangeness that made others uncomfortable.

Mr. Loughner unnerved one parent, Mr. Osler, by smiling when there wasn’t anything to smile about. He puzzled another parent, Ms. Montanaro, by reading aloud a short story he had written, about angels and the end of the world, that she found strange and incomprehensible. And he rattled Breanna Castle, his friend, by making a video that featured a gas station, traffic and his incoherent mumbles.

“The more people became shocked and worried about him, the more withdrawn he got,” Ms. Castle said.

Not long after showing up intoxicated at school, Jared dropped out. He also dropped out of band. Then, in September 2007, he and a friend were caught with drug paraphernalia in a white van.

Something was happening to Jared Loughner. It was clear to his friends, clear to anyone who encountered him.

“He would get so upset about bigger issues, like why do positive and negative magnets have to attract each other,” recalled Mr. Gutierrez, the friend who joined him in target practice in the desert. “He had the most incredible thoughts, but he could not handle them.”

Facing Rejection

Two Pima Community College police officers drove into Orangewood Estates and up to a flat-roofed house on Soledad Avenue, the one with that crooked mesquite tree in the front and the old cars always parked in the driveway. Their mission that night in late September was dicey enough to require two other officers to linger in the neighborhood as backup.

The owner of the house, Randy Loughner, locked away the dogs and directed the officers to the garage, where his son, Jared, a student at the community college, was waiting. One of the officers explained that the purpose of their visit was to serve Jared with a “Notice of Immediate Suspension” from the college.

The officer, Dana Mattocks, read the letter aloud, detailing a litany of troubled and disruptive behavior, including the recent posting of an unsettling video titled “Pima Community College School — Genocide/Scam — Free Education — Broken United States Constitution.”

As Officer Mattocks spoke, he later recalled, Jared Loughner stared at him as if in a “constant trance.” The notice was handed to the young man, who then read the letter back to the officers.

“Even though we spent approximately one hours relaying the information and narration of Jared’s actions that brought him to his current predicament,” Officer Mattocks wrote in a subsequent report, “Jared left his silence and spoke out saying, ‘I realize now that this is all a scam.’ ”

The officers declared the meeting over, chatted briefly with Jared’s father in the backyard and left the Loughner family to deal with this “current predicament.”

What had happened?

After dropping out of high school, Jared Loughner had tried to straighten up, friends say. He shed his unkempt image, cut drugs from his life and indulged only in the occasional 24-ounce can of Miller High Life. He began wearing crisp clothes and got a job at Eddie Bauer.

“He was damned strait-laced and, I believe, had given up weed,” Mr. Gutierrez recalled. “At Eddie Bauer, he tucked his shirt in, wore a belt and dressed himself nicely, real clean cut. He could have been in any office building and would have looked fine.”

And when the two friends got together, Mr. Loughner would limit himself to that one big can of beer — he was notoriously frugal — and talk of bettering himself. “He started saying that he wanted to stay out of trouble and was thinking about doing good stuff with his life,” Mr. Gutierrez said.

Still, things never quite clicked.

Mr. Loughner seemed to meet rejection at every turn. He tried to enlist in the Army in 2008 but failed its drug test. He held a series of jobs, often briefly: Peter Piper Pizza, but not long enough to make it past the three-month probationary period, an executive said; the Mandarin Grill, where the owner recalled that after less than a month of employment, the teenager simply stopped showing up.

After leaving his job at Eddie Bauer, he became a volunteer at an animal-care center in Tucson. On his application, he came across as a normal and ambitious teenager, expressing interest in “community service, fun, reference and experience.” But within two months he was told not to come back until he could follow rules.

At least there was the Northwest Campus of Pima Community College, where tuition was affordable, the quail often skittered across the grounds and Mr. Loughner found intellectual sanctuary. Beginning in the summer of 2005, when he was just 16, he began taking classes: music fundamentals, philosophy, sign language, algebra, biology, computers, logic — even Pilates.

But beginning in 2010, Mr. Loughner’s mostly private struggle with basic societal norms tipped into the public settings of the classroom, the library, the campus.

Pima Community College has six campuses, four educational centers and nearly 70,000 students. But one student in particular, it seems, came to occupy the attention of its administrators and security officers.

Disruptions and Monitoring

In February, an administrator reported to the campus police that Mr. Loughner had disrupted the class with his strange reaction to the reading of another student’s poem, taking a huge leap from its context to abortion, wars and killing people. The school official described him as “creepy.” They would keep an eye on him.

In April, the director of the library summoned the police because Mr. Loughner was making loud noises while listening to music through his earphones. According to a police report, he was advised “that this behavior was not an acceptable practice for a public setting, especially in a library.” The student said it would not happen again.

In May, an instructor reported to the campus police that when she informed Mr. Loughner that he had gotten a B in her Pilates class, he threw his work down and declared the grade unacceptable. Things got so tense that the instructor felt intimidated, and feared that the moment might become physical.

In June, a school counselor investigated an incident in which Mr. Loughner had disrupted a math class. When she inquired, Mr. Loughner first said that he was offended by the inquiry, then explained, “My instructor said he called a number 6, and I said I call it 18.” He said he also asked the instructor to explain, “How can you deny math instead of accept it?” He went on to strike the increasingly familiar theme of persecution: that he was being “scammed.”

“This student was warned,” the counselor, Delisa Siddall, wrote in a report. “He has extreme views and frequently meanders from the point. He seems to have difficulty understanding how his actions impact others, yet very attuned to his unique ideology that is not always homogeneous. ... Since he reported that an incident such as this occurred in another class, administrators will have to help this student clearly understand what is appropriate classroom dialog.”

Mr. Loughner said that he would not ask any more questions for fear of being expelled. All the while, though, he was expressing himself in sometimes odd conversations with other players in an online strategy game. Writing under the moniker “Dare,” he denounced his “scam” education, expressed frustration over his continued unemployment (“How many applications ... is a lot?”) and revealed that he had been fired from five jobs — including one, at a hamburger restaurant, that he lost because he left while in the throes of what he called a “mental breakdown.”

He also wrote of his “strong interest in logic.” But, it seems, it was a logic whose inductive and deductive reasoning made sense only to him.

Around this time, Mr. Loughner bumped into his old girlfriend, Ms. Figueroa, in a store. Years earlier, she had fallen for a shy boy in her computer class; they would hold hands during football games and hang out after marching band practice. Now here he was, his long locks shorn and an off-kilter air. A completely different person, it seemed.

“It was kind of like he wasn’t there,” Ms. Figueroa recalled. “I can’t put my finger on it. It just wasn’t a good feeling. I kind of got a chill.”

In September, Mr. Loughner filled out paperwork to have his record expunged on the 2007 drug paraphernalia charge. Although he did not need to bother — he completed a diversion program, so the charge was never actually on his record — Judge Jose Luis Castillo, who handled the case in Pima County Consolidated Justice Court, said after the shooting that, in retrospect, it definitely “crossed my mind” that Mr. Loughner was worried that the charge would prevent him from buying a weapon.

And that same month, there was another incident at Pima Community College, another class disruption caused by Mr. Loughner, another summoning of the campus police. A teacher had informed him that he would receive only a half-credit for handing in an assignment late, and he was declaring this a violation of his right to freedom of speech.

One of the responding police officers began to engage him with simple questions, only to enter the Loughner world of logic, in which freedom of speech morphed into freedom of thought and his teacher was required to accept the thoughts he wrote down as a passing grade. The other officer took note of the student’s tilted head and jittery, darting eyes.

A few days later, during a meeting with a school administrator, Mr. Loughner said that he had paid for his courses illegally because, “I did not pay with gold and silver” — a standard position among right-wing extremist groups. With Mr. Loughner’s consent, that same administrator then arranged to meet with the student and his mother to discuss the creation of a “behavioral contract” for him, after which the official noted: “Throughout the meeting, Jared held himself very rigidly and smiled overtly at inappropriate times.”

At the same time, other college administrators and officers were just learning of the “Pima Community College School-Genocide” video, in which the narrator says, “We are examining the torture of students,” and “I haven’t forgotten the teacher that gave me a B for freedom of speech,” and “This is Pima Community College, one of the biggest scams in America” — and “Thank you ... This is Jared ... from Pima College.”

Mr. Loughner was informed in his father’s garage that he was suspended. Not long after, the college sent him a letter saying that he would not be welcomed back until he presented certification from a mental health professional that he was not a threat. That never happened.

By now the strange presence that was Jared Loughner was known in places beyond the Northwest Campus of Pima Community College.

Leaving an Impression

At a small local branch of a major bank, for example, the tellers would have their fingers on the alarm button whenever they saw him approaching.

It was not just his appearance — the pale shaved head and eyebrows — that unnerved them. It was also the aggressive, often sexist things that he said, including asserting that women should not be allowed to hold positions of power or authority.

One individual with knowledge of the situation said Mr. Loughner once got into a dispute with a female branch employee after she told him that a request of his would violate bank policy. He brusquely challenged the woman, telling her that she should not have any power.

“He was considered to be short-tempered and made people at the bank very uncomfortable,” said the individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the matter.

The bank’s employees could not forget how, after bulletproof glass was installed at the bank, Mr. Loughner would try to stick his finger through a small space atop the glass and laugh to himself, the person said.

And employees at the Sacred Art Tattoo shop would not forget that day in November — the same month in which Mr. Loughner bought a Glock — when he walked in wearing jean shorts and a muscle shirt and holding up a 9-millimeter bullet that he said he wanted replicated on his right shoulder.

It took less than a half-hour and cost $60. And when it was done, Mr. Loughner insisted on shaking the artist’s hand.

Then, a week later, he returned to get a second bullet tattoo.

“I started talking to him about what he liked to do, hobbies, pastimes,” recalled Carl Grace, 30, who drew the second tattoo. “He said he dreamed 14 to 15 hours a day. He said he knew how to control his sleeping and control his dreams.” But when the artist asked about the meaning behind the tattoo, the customer just smiled.

“When he left, I said: ‘That’s a weird dude. That’s a Columbine candidate.’ ”

A Busy Morning

At 9:41 last Saturday morning, a 60-year-old cabdriver named John Marino pulled his Ford Crown Victoria into the parking lot of a Circle K convenience store on West Cortaro Farms Road to collect his first fare of the day. The cashier inside raised her finger to signal one minute.

Then out came his customer, just another customer, a normal-looking young man. Climbing into the back seat, the man said he needed to go to the Safeway supermarket on Oracle Road, on the Northwest side. Their five-mile ride began.

Mr. Marino has been driving a taxi for a dozen years; he likes to say that he has hauled everyone from street walkers to mayors. He does not pry for information from his passengers, mostly because he doesn’t care. But if a customer wants to talk, he will talk. He glanced at his rear-view mirror and saw his passenger looking out the window. The passenger was quiet, until he wasn’t.

“Do you always remember everybody you pick up?” Mr. Marino recalled the man asking.

“Yeah, vaguely,” Mr. Marino says he answered. “I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s hard to remember everybody.”

At another point, the passenger blurted out, “I drink too much.” To which the cabdriver answered, “Oh, that’s too bad.”

Then it was back to silence.

By this point, the passenger, Mr. Loughner, had already had a full day.

Late the night before, he had dropped off a roll of 35-millimeter film to be developed at a Walgreens on West Ina Road. Law-enforcement officials would later say the roll included many photographs of Mr. Loughner wearing a bright red G-string and posing with a Glock. In some photos, presumably mirrored reflections, he holds the gun by his crotch; in others, next to his naked buttocks.

At 12:30 in the morning, he checked into Room 411 at a Motel 6 less than two miles from his house — an occasional habit, his parents later told investigators. The motel, a mottled brown building, sits near a railroad track; one of its rooms is still boarded up, marking where a guest shot himself recently.

Less than two hours later, he hopped back in his Chevy Nova to run a couple of errands, including a return to the Walgreens to collect those photographs of him posing nearly naked with a Glock. Soon after that, he posted a message on his Myspace page: “Goodbye friends.”

Shortly after 6, he headed back out for more predawn errands, including a visit to a Super Wal-Mart to buy ammunition and a black backpack-style diaper bag.

At 7:30, minutes after sunrise, he was stopped by an Arizona Game and Fish Department officer for running a red light, but was cordial and cooperative in providing his license, registration and insurance card.

He returned home, where his father confronted him about the contents of the black diaper bag he was lifting out the Chevy’s trunk. He mumbled something before dashing into the surrounding desert, his father giving futile chase in a vehicle. (Days later, a man walking in the desert came across a black diaper bag jammed with ammunition.)

Mr. Loughner then made his way to the Circle K, about a mile away. He called for a cab.

Now that cab was delivering its passenger in a hooded sweatshirt to his destination, the Safeway supermarket plaza, where a congresswoman was about to greet constituents. Mr. Loughner pulled out the Ziploc bag where he kept his cash and handed Mr. Marino a $20 bill for the $14.25 fare. The driver could not break the bill, so the two men went into the supermarket to get change.

Mr. Marino got in line at the customer-service desk, behind someone cashing in a winning lottery ticket. He received a few bills for the $20 and handed Mr. Loughner a $5 bill — meaning his tip was 75 cents. The cabdriver would later wonder why, considering what was about to happen, his passenger didn’t just let him keep the $20.

Before going their separate ways, Mr. Marino recalled, Mr. Loughner asked, “Can I shake your hand?”

Sure.

“And I noticed his hands were really sweaty,” recalled the cabdriver who had seen all types. “You know?”

Reporting was contributed by A.G. Sulzberger, Richard Oppel and Anissa Tanweer from Tucson; Sarah Wheaton from New York; and Janie Lorber from Washington. Jack Begg, Toby Lyles, Jack Styczynski and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

    Looking Behind the Mug-Shot Grin of an Accused Killer, NYT, 15.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16loughner.html

Man Shot in Tucson Rampage Is Arrested at a TV Taping

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and SAM DOLNICK

TUCSON — A victim of the shooting spree here that killed six people and wounded 13, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was arrested Saturday after he spoke threateningly at a televised forum intended to help this stricken city heal, the police and witnesses said.

The man, J. Eric Fuller, 63, a military veteran who supports Ms. Giffords, was “involuntarily committed for mental health evaluation,” said Jason Ogan, a spokesman for the Pima County sheriff’s office.

Mr. Fuller, who was shot in the left knee and back on Jan. 8, was among several victims, medical personnel and others who attended a special forum at St. Odilia Catholic Church hosted by Christiane Amanpour to be televised Sunday on ABC.

State Representative Terri Proud, a Republican, was sitting two rows behind Mr. Fuller. The topic of gun control came up in the forum, she said, and one of the speakers made a comment about a bill introduced recently in Arizona that would allow faculty members on college campuses with concealed weapons permits to carry guns.

Ms. Proud said she spoke up to clarify the bill’s language. Trent Humphries, the founder of the Tucson Tea Party, who was sitting one row behind her, rose to speak and suggested that discussion about gun legislation be postponed until after the funerals. He started to say that he had also been affected by the tragedy because a neighbor was a victim.

At that point, Ms. Proud said, Mr. Fuller blurted out to Mr. Humphries, “You’re dead.”

Mr. Fuller then began to “behave in a very odd manner,” she said. “He was making inappropriate comments.”

Ms. Proud said that after the forum ended, she went to one of the police officers providing security at the forum and asked him to file a report about Mr. Fuller’s remark to Mr. Humphries. The officer told her it was being investigated.

About five police officers surrounded Mr. Fuller and escorted him out. As he was leaving, Ms. Proud said, he turned and yelled, “You’re all whores!”

Mr. Fuller was also involved in a confrontation on Jan. 8, shortly before the attack on Ms. Giffords, which occurred at an event she held for her constituents outside a Safeway supermarket. He said in a long interview last week with The New York Times that he had argued there with a man he described as a former Marine after a heated discussion over politics. Gabriel Zimmerman, an aide to Ms. Giffords, separated the two.

Mr. Zimmerman was killed in the attack later that morning.

Mr. Fuller spoke dismissively of Republicans during the interview. “They appeal to simple-minded rednecks,” he said.

He said that he had had trouble sleeping after he was wounded and that he calmed himself the first night by writing down the Declaration of Independence, which he had memorized three decades earlier.

In the first days after the attack, his anger seemed especially strong. In the interview, he repeatedly denounced the “Tea Party crime syndicate,” and said he placed some of the blame for the shooting on Sarah Palin and other Republican leaders, saying he believed they had contributed to a toxic atmosphere.

He said he had expected to see protesters at Ms. Giffords’s event, and had planned “to shout them down because I can make a lot of noise.”

Speaking of Jared L. Loughner, who is accused of being the gunman, he said, “Saying anything about him would be a waste of breath. Recognizing his existence is a waste. I don’t like his face.”

Later in the week, Mr. Fuller visited the Loughner home to apologize to the parents for calling their son names, according to reporters at the scene. They said he did not manage to see them.

Mr. Fuller used to drive a limousine, but in recent years, he said, he got by working various odd jobs, including collecting signatures for political campaigns.

In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Dr. Laura Nelson, deputy director of the Division of Behavioral Sciences of the Arizona Department of Health Services, said that Mr. Fuller’s actions could be a response to the trauma he suffered in the shooting.

“Grief after what happened here in Tucson last week is a completely normal reaction, and anger is a very common symptom of grief,” said Dr. Nelson, who was invited to speak at the forum. “I hope that he’ll get the help that he needs to get through this very difficult time.”

Reporting was contributed by Jennifer Medina, A. G. Sulzberger and William Yardley from Tucson, and Sarah Wheaton from New York.

    Man Shot in Tucson Rampage Is Arrested at a TV Taping, NYT, 15.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16fuller.html

After Tucson, Is the Anger Gone?

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT BAI

WASHINGTON — For anyone who hoped that the tragedy in Tucson might jolt the political class into some new period of civility and reflection, suddenly subduing all the radio ranters and acid bloggers, the days that followed brought a cold reality.

Within hours of the shooting rampage that killed six and critically wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, liberals were accusing conservatives of inciting the violence, and conservatives were accusing liberals of exploiting the actions of a madman.

In what may have been his most emotional speech since the 2008 campaign, President Obama registered his own disappointment, pleading with all sides for temperance. “What we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another,” the president said in his Tucson eulogy. “If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost.”

If the shooting didn’t feel like the turning point in the civic life of the nation that some of us had imagined it might become, then it may be because such turning points aren’t always immediately evident. Or maybe it’s because the murder suspect appeared to have no obvious ideology, his crime an imperfect parable for the consequences of political rhetoric.

Perhaps, though, we have to consider another explanation — that the speed and fractiousness of our modern society make it all but impossible now for any one moment to transform the national debate.

Not all historians accept the idea of transformational moments, which, they point out, may seem neater and more definitive in retrospect than they were at the time. But others are inclined to see the American story as a series of crescendos and climaxes, periods of mounting internal strife that are resolved, or at least recast, by crystallizing moments.

Beverly Gage, who teaches 20th-century history at Yale, points to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building by union activists in 1910, which provoked a national debate on workers’ rights. In the aftermath, President William Howard Taft created a national commission to investigate tensions in the workplace, and many of its reforms, including the eight-hour workday, were eventually adopted.

Professor Gage also cites the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The South had endured its share of martyrdom before then, but the killing of four young girls in a church basement was more than even casually engaged Americans could stomach. “That actually became a moment when everyone took a step back and asked if there was something wrong in the country that was causing this,” she says.

Not all transformational moments entail violence. John Lewis Gaddis, the pre-eminent cold war scholar and Yale professor, sees a national turning point in 1954, when Senator Joseph McCarthy testified before a Senate subcommittee in what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings.

The interrogation of McCarthy by Joseph Welch, an Army lawyer — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — resonated throughout a country that was just then discovering the nascent power of television. Years of ruinous disagreement over the threat of internal Communism seemed to dissipate almost overnight.

“The whole McCarthy moment — the air just went out of it altogether,” Professor Gaddis says. “McCarthy was politically dead at that point and physically dead in three years.”

Of course, this kind of shift is probably never so apparent in real time. It may be that in 50 years, historians will look back at the last week and say that a long period of shrill, fear-inducing politics and escalating vituperation, which seemed to paralyze our politics at a time when we could little afford the inaction, began to fade at last as a horrified nation buried a 9-year-old girl and prayed for a congresswoman to wiggle her toes.

There are good reasons to think, though, that such defining moments are simply relics of our past, like air raid drills and loyalty oaths. There was a brief time, after 168 people were killed in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, when it seemed that all the extremism on the right had been deflated. But the impact of the blast receded so quickly from memory that Michael Kazin, a Georgetown historian, says a lot of his students today had never heard of it.

Not even the terrorist attacks of 2001, which surely rank high among the most jarring events in American history, did much to unify the society in any lasting way. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers had immediate and significant consequences for the nation’s foreign policy, but any sense of common purpose had more or less vanished by the next year’s elections, when Republicans slammed their Democratic opponents —including Max Cleland, a man who lost three of his limbs fighting in Vietnam — as insufficiently patriotic.

It may just be that modern society is impervious to brilliant flashes of clarity. A century ago, news traveled slowly enough for Americans to absorb and evaluate it; today’s events are almost instantaneously digested and debated, in a way that makes even the most cataclysmic event feel temporal. The stunning massacre at point-blank range at a Sun Belt strip plaza is at least partially eclipsed, within a few days, by Sarah Palin’s “blood libel” comment and the outrage of Jewish groups. And onward we go.

Unlike Americans in the television age, who shared the common ritual of watching an Ed Sullivan or a Walter Cronkite at the same hour every night, modern Americans increasingly customize their information, picking up radically different perspectives from whichever sources they trust — Fox News or MSNBC, Newsmax or Huffington Post. There is very little shared experience in the nation now; there are only competing versions of the experience, consumed in such a way as to confirm whatever preconceptions you already have, rather than to make you reflect on them.

“You wonder what it would take for a comment like the one Joe Welch made to really sink in in the current environment,” Professor Gaddis says. “Everything that anyone says is immediately spun. And I mean spun in a political sense, but also in the sense of a washing machine, so that the meaning really gets bled out.”

None of which is to argue that the country and its dialogue can’t be reshaped by events. But it may mean updating our theory of fundamental change to rely more on the power of cumulative, smaller revelations, rather than singular, transformational ones. Perhaps the modern society just changes more grudgingly and more gradually than it did before.

By the end of last week, after all, there were some positive signs amid the recrimination. Roger Ailes, the Fox News Channel’s combative president and a pioneer of personally injurious politics, said he had called on his anchors and reporters to “shut up” and “tone it down.” Democrats in the Senate were pushing for a new seating arrangement for the upcoming State of the Union address that would force the two parties to intermingle — a symbolic gesture, to be sure, but one that would present a different kind of visual to a public weary of division.

They were tiny steps in the right direction. And even as the shots in Tucson still echo, that may be all any of us can really expect.

    After Tucson, Is the Anger Gone?, NYT, 15.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/weekinreview/16bai.html

At a Gun Show and a Safeway, Tucson Looks for ‘Normalcy’

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY, MICHAEL LUO and SAM DOLNICK

This article is by William Yardley, Michael Luo and Sam Dolnick.

TUCSON — A week after a gunman killed six people and wounded 13 others here, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a gun show at the Pima County Fairgrounds went forward as planned on Saturday, and the Safeway supermarket where the shooting occurred reopened for business.

At both places, visitors observed a moment of silence in honor of the victims.

At the Safeway, Nancy Ostromencki, 56, said, “I decided I needed to come here again to start to reclaim normalcy.”

Ms. Ostromencki, a piano teacher who said she was inside the store when the shooting occurred, said her daily routine included buying a Frappuccino and treats for her dog, Bailey, at the supermarket, and “I can’t let that worm have more control than he’s already had.”

Jared L. Loughner, 22, has been charged in the rampage, in which Ms. Giffords was severely wounded and a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl and four others were killed.

Doctors on Saturday operated on Ms. Giffords to remove her breathing tube and replace it with a tracheotomy tube, officials at University Medical Center said in a statement. Doctors said they also inserted a feeding tube “to provide nutritional support.”

Doctors said Ms. Giffords was able to breathe on her own but the breathing tube was a precaution. With it removed, doctors said they could evaluate her ability to speak.

The gun show is one of five that is held in Tucson each year by Crossroads of the West, a Utah company. An answering machine greeting for the company on Saturday morning said, “Yes, the Tucson gun show in Arizona will be on.”

Bob Templeton, the company’s owner, said he and Crossroads of the West’s other leaders considered canceling the Tucson show, which is scheduled to run through Sunday, and even consulted with the fairgrounds operators about whether to do so.

Mr. Templeton said the organizers asked themselves: “ ‘Are we being insensitive?’ ”

He said they concluded that they were not.

“This really is not about guns,” he said, referring to the shooting. “It’s about mental illness and a person who had an agenda.”

Mr. Templeton said that none of the roughly 200 exhibitors had canceled, and more than a thousand people had shown up by early Saturday.

Items for sale included “gun juice,” a type of lubricant; 40-round magazines for AK-47s, at $19.99; and bumper stickers critical of President Obama.

Jerry Mercante, an employee of Defensive Arms and Ammo, which has a small store in Tucson and a large display of handguns at the show, said he had sold more than a dozen weapons in a little more than 90 minutes, including at least one Glock. A Glock 19, the model that was used in last week’s shooting, was on sale at Mr. Mercante’s booth for $489.

Mr. Mercante said sales at his store had edged up this week, just as they have across Arizona since the shooting. “If you turn on the TV and see gun, gun, gun, people want to buy a gun,” he said.

Still, there were small indications that things were different at the gun show this weekend. A box at the exhibit hall’s entrance solicited donations for a “Tragedy in Tucson” victims fund. (A sign promoting the National Rifle Association was beside the box.) An American flag flew at half-staff.

At 12:15 p.m., Mr. Templeton asked the crowed to observe a moment of silence and asked for reflection on “what we might do in the future to mitigate this kind of violence.” He extended condolences to the victims and encouraged people to “lawfully and thoughtfully continue to exercise your Second Amendment rights.”

Rick Krueger, the first person in line early Saturday, blamed the mental health system for the shooting spree.

“It’s not guns that kill people,” said Mr. Krueger, 58, who added that he worked in the mental health field. “People kill people.”

In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama spoke about the shootings and urged members of Congress to work together as they returned to Washington. He recalled that in the days right after the attack, “one of the places we saw that sense of community on display was on the floor of Congress.”

“One by one, representatives from all parts of the country and all points of view rose in common cause to honor Gabby and the other victims and to reflect on our shared hopes for this country,” the president said. “As shrill and discordant as our politics can be at times, it was a moment that reminded us of who we really are — and how much we depend on one another.”

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, in an article on The Washington Post’s Op-Ed page on Sunday, praised the president for the speech he delivered on Wednesday at a memorial service in Tucson.

“I disagree with many of the president’s policies, but I believe he is a patriot sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country’s cause,” Mr. McCain wrote.

“I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals. And I reject accusations that Americans who vigorously oppose his policies are less intelligent, compassionate or just than those who support them.”

“Our political discourse should be more civil than it currently is, and we all, myself included, bear some responsibility for it not being so,” Mr. McCain said. “It probably asks too much of human nature to expect any of us to be restrained at all times by persistent modesty and empathy from committing rhetorical excesses that exaggerate our differences and ignore our similarities. But I do not think it is beyond our ability and virtue to refrain from substituting character assassination for spirited and respectful debate.”

The Safeway, in a shopping center at the corner of Ina Road and Oracle Road in northern Tucson, reopened at 7 a.m. on Saturday, two days after company officials said the F.B.I. gave it control of the building again.

Employees had spent the time since then restocking shelves and trying to make the store, which includes a Starbucks stand, feel fresh. Safeway invited a team of pastors and counselors to spend the weekend at the store talking with people. Many customers said visiting the site was painful.

Ritwik Das, a convenience store owner who shops there several times a week, said he had been afraid to return.

“But I’ve got to shop,” he said. “You cannot live on fear.”

A small section in front of the store has been preserved as a memorial, with flowers and teddy bears, and several employees cried as they recounted their experiences the day of the shooting.

Just after 10 a.m., the approximate time the gunman opened fire on Ms. Giffords and a line of people waiting to see her, the store stopped for a moment of silence.

All of the employees and shoppers gathered out front, joined by dozens of neighbors, to form a large semicircle around the memorial.

“This has impacted pretty much everybody,” said Helen Fahm, who lives nearby and has walked her dog, Ellie, in the parking lot every morning for years.

“It’s just a question of time.” she said. “Time heals.”

John Green, the father of Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old victim, told CNN on Friday that some of his daughter’s organs had been donated to a young girl in Boston. Mr. Green said it was another way that Christina, a student council member who was interested in public service, would have wanted to help others.

Mr. Green said he would love to meet the girl who received the transplant and “give her a big hug.”

Jo Becker and Jennifer Medina contributed reporting.

    At a Gun Show and a Safeway, Tucson Looks for ‘Normalcy’, NYT, 15.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16giffords.html

No One Listened to Gabrielle Giffords

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By FRANK RICH

OF the many truths in President Obama’s powerful Tucson speech, none was more indisputable than his statement that no one can know what is in a killer’s mind. So why have we spent so much time debating exactly that?

The answer is classic American denial. It was easier to endlessly parse Jared Lee Loughner’s lunatic library — did he favor “The Communist Manifesto” or Ayn Rand? — than confront the larger and harsher snapshot of our current landscape that emerged after his massacre. A week on, that denial is becoming even more entrenched. As soon as the president left the podium Wednesday night, we started shifting into our familiar spin-dry post-tragedy cycle of the modern era — speedy “closure,” followed by a return to business as usual, followed by national amnesia.

If we learn nothing from this tragedy, we are back where we started. And where we started was with two years of accelerating political violence — actual violence, not to be confused with violent language — that struck fear into many, not the least of whom was Gabrielle Giffords.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s stipulate that Loughner was a “lone nutjob” who had never listened to Glenn Beck or been a card-carrying member of either the Tea or Communist parties. Let’s also face another tragedy: The only two civic reforms that might have actually stopped him — tighter gun control and an effective mental health safety net — won’t materialize even now.

Gun and ammunition sales spiked last week, especially for the specific varieties given the Loughner imprimatur. No editorial — or bloodbath — will move Congress to enact serious gun control (which Giffords herself never advocated and Obama has rarely pushed since 2008). Enhanced mental health coverage is also a nonstarter when the highest G.O.P. priority is to repeal the federal expansion of health care. In Arizona, cutbacks are already so severe that terminally ill patients are being denied life-saving organ transplants.

The other inescapable reality was articulated by Sarah Palin, believe it or not, in her “blood libel” video. Speaking of acrimonious partisan debate, she asked, “When was it less heated — back in those calm days when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols?” She’s right. Calls for civility will have no more lasting impact on the “tone” of American discourse now than they did after the J.F.K. assassination or Oklahoma City. Especially not in an era when technology allows all 300 million Americans a cost-free megaphone for unmediated rants.

Did Loughner see Palin’s own most notorious contribution to the rancorous tone — her March 2010 Web graphic targeting Congressional districts? We have no idea — nor does it matter. But Giffords did. Her reaction to it — captured in an interview she did back then with Chuck Todd of MSNBC — was the most recycled, if least understood, video of last week.

The week of that interview began with the House passing the health care bill on Sunday. Within hours, on Monday morning, vandals smashed the front door of Giffords’s office in Tucson. The Palin “target” map (and the accompanying Twitter dictum to “RELOAD”) went up on Tuesday, just one day after that vandalism — timing that was at best tone-deaf and at worst nastily provocative. Not just Giffords, but at least three other of the 20 members of Congress on the Palin map were also hit with vandalism or death threats.

In her MSNBC interview that Wednesday, Giffords said that Palin had put the “crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” adding that “when people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.” Chuck Todd then asked Giffords if “in fairness, campaign rhetoric and war rhetoric have been interchangeable for years.” She responded that colleagues who had been in the House “20, 30 years” had never seen vitriol this bad. But Todd moved on, and so did the Beltway. What’s the big deal about a little broken glass? Few wanted to see what Giffords saw — that the vandalism and death threats were the latest consequences of a tide of ugly insurrectionism that had been rising since the final weeks of the 2008 campaign and that had threatened to turn violent from the start.

Giffords’s first brush with that reality had occurred some seven months before her office was vandalized — in the red-hot health care fever of August 2009. She had held another “Congress on Your Corner” meeting, at a Safeway in the town of Douglas. There the crowd’s rage and the dropping of a gun by one attendee prompted aides worried about her safety to summon the police. The Tucson Tea Party co-founder, Trent Humphries, told The Arizona Daily Star afterward that this was a lie, that “nobody was threatening Gabby.” After Loughner’s massacre, Humphries was still faulting her — this time for holding “an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever.”

Others on the right spent last week loudly protesting the politicization of tragedy. What was most revealing was how often they tried to rewrite the history of previous incidents having nothing to do with Loughner. A Palin aide claimed that her target map was only invoking a “surveyor’s symbol,” not gun sights. A Tucson Tea Party leader announced that the attack on Giffords’s office (never solved by the police) was probably caused by skateboarding kids. Mike Pence, a potential G.O.P. “values” candidate for president, told the C-Span audience that those bearing firearms at Congressional town hall meetings and Obama events (including one in Arizona that August of 2009) were no different from anti-Bush demonstrators “waving placards.”

For macabre absurdity, it would seem hard to top Newt Gingrich, who wailed about leftists linking Loughner to the right as if he had not famously blamed a psychotic double-murder of 1994, Susan Smith’s drowning of her two sons in South Carolina, on “Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” But Representative Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, did top Newt. On “Meet the Press” last Sunday he implored us to “treat each other as fellow children of God” without acknowledging (or being questioned about) his 2009 diatribe branding Obama as “an enemy of humanity.”

As the president said in Tucson, we lack not just civil discourse, but honest discourse. Much of last week’s televised bloviation was dishonest, dedicated to the pious, feel-good sentiment that both sides are equally culpable for the rage of the past two years. To construct this false equivalency, every left-leaning Web site and Democratic politician’s record was dutifully culled for incendiary invective. If that’s the standard, then both sides are equally at fault — rhetoric can indeed be as violent on the left as on the right.

But that sidesteps the issue. This isn’t about angry blog posts or verbal fisticuffs. Since Obama’s ascension, we’ve seen repeated incidents of political violence. Just a short list would include the 2009 killing of three Pittsburgh police officers by a neo-Nazi Obama-hater; last year’s murder-suicide kamikaze attack on an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex.; and the California police shootout with an assailant plotting to attack an obscure liberal foundation obsessively vilified by Beck.

Obama said, correctly, on Wednesday that “a simple lack of civility” didn’t cause the Tucson tragedy. It didn’t cause these other incidents either. What did inform the earlier violence — including the vandalism at Giffords’s office — was an antigovernment radicalism as rabid on the right now as it was on the left in the late 1960s. That Loughner was likely insane, with no coherent ideological agenda, does not mean that a climate of antigovernment hysteria has no effect on him or other crazed loners out there. Nor does Loughner’s insanity mitigate the surge in unhinged political zealots acting out over the last two years. That’s why so many — on both the finger-pointing left and the hyper-defensive right — automatically assumed he must be another of them.

Have politicians stoked the pre-Loughner violence by advocating that citizens pursue “Second Amendment remedies” or be “armed and dangerous”? We don’t know. What’s more disturbing is what Republican and conservative leaders have not said. Their continuing silence during two years of simmering violence has been chilling.

A few unexpected voices have expressed alarm. After an antigovernment gunman struck at Washington’s Holocaust museum in June 2009, Shepard Smith of Fox News noted the rising vitriol in his e-mail traffic and warned on air that more “amped up” Americans could be “getting the gun out.” The former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum took on the “reckless right” that August, citing the incident at the Giffords Safeway event. But when a Department of Homeland Security report warned of far-right extremism and attacks by “lone wolves” that same summer, Gingrich called it a smear and John Boehner demanded an apology.

Last week a conservative presidential candidate, Tim Pawlenty, timidly said it wouldn’t be his “style” to use Palin’s target map, but was savaged so viciously by his own camp that he immediately retreated. A senior Republican senator told Politico that he saw the Tucson bloodbath as a “cautionary tale” for his party, yet refused to be named.

What are they and their peers so afraid of? No doubt that someone might reload — the same fears that prompted Gabrielle Giffords to speak up, calmly but firmly, last March. Unless and until they can match her courage and speak out too, it’s hard to see what will change.

    No One Listened to Gabrielle Giffords, NYT, 15.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opinion/16rich.html