Rico's rants: A good reason, at least

Jennifer Steinhauer has an article in The New York Times about gubs and what they do to people:

Gabrielle Giffords looked slightly stricken as she considered the question: Would she feel bad about starring in a political advertisement against her former House colleagues who declined to stand with her on guns? “Yes,” she said, it would be painful.
“Sometimes you have to do things that are hard,” said Mark E. Kelly, Giffords' husband, as she tucked herself close to him on their couch. Giffords nodded, as she often does when Kelly— as he often does— intuits the many thoughts she is still unable to express fully. “Really hard,” she added.
Giffords, a former Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, a gun owner, an astronaut’s wife, a shooting survivor, and an incipient gun-control advocate, is settling into the third act of her public life.
Her career as a lawmaker is behind her, but so is her role as the fragile, slightly mysterious victim in the months after she was shot point-blank in a parking lot here just over two years ago. Now she is the face and emotional dynamism behind a new advocacy group and a separate political action committee, Americans for Responsible Solutions, dedicated to reducing gun violence. It is an effort, she said, that gives her “purpose.”
Giffords’ hair, short and wispy for some time after her brain surgery, has returned to its natural bounce. Once heavily guarded by Capitol Police officers and a stream of medical professionals, Giffords now lives with Kelly and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Claire, and Nelson, her service dog, in a modern adobe-style house they bought in August, decorated with bright, large-scale paintings and sculptures.
Giffords’ ability to understand others is unscathed. During a two-hour interview here, she talked about whether she missed Washington (“a little”); explained, in short phrases, her positions on firearms; and made a sly one-word joke (“wasteland”) about one of her least favorite places. She revealed the provenance of some of her paintings (her old Congressional office), pointed out one that was PG-13 (a semiabstract nude), and lamented what a recent frost had taken from her garden. Once limited to two words— “what” and “chicken”— each month she gains more.
Speaking in full sentences is still a struggle, and she has regular therapy sessions to help recover her speech and to manage her other impairments. Her vision is impaired, and her right leg and arm are largely paralyzed. She can move her shoulder, her hip, and, slightly, her foot. The rest of her time is largely spent preparing for the legislative battles, political campaigns and potential face-offs with friends and former colleagues that will be waged through her month-old organizations. She and Kelly are already looking at governor contests, Congressional special elections, and 2014 races. They hope to influence the outcome by leveraging the power of their names and their story, an effort presaged last month when Giffords lit up a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with her brief and powerful plea: “We must do something.”
“Sometimes there will be some difficult conversations,” Kelly said. “There already have been.”
For nearly two decades, the National Rifle Association has succeeded in rewarding lawmakers who backed legislation supporting gun rights and firearm manufacturers and punishing those who did not. Those efforts largely overwhelmed the voices on the opposing side.
But after the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in December that left twenty elementary school pupils dead, Giffords and Kelly— with several others like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City— are trying to sway races from the other side.
Bloomberg’s political action committee, Independence USA, was widely credited with bringing an end to the career of Representative Joe Baca, a Democrat from California, last year, after it spent $3.3 million on television ads and mailers attacking him. That political action committee is now focusing on Debbie Halvorson, a Democratic former congresswoman who is running in a special election to succeed former Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr. in the Chicago area.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence recently ran newspaper advertisements against Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a freshman Democrat from North Dakota who has been critical of President Obama’s legislative proposals to curtail some guns, and made a video criticizing Representative John Barrow, a Democrat from Georgia, a strong advocate of gun rights.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal group, has run an ad attacking Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, for his positions on guns.
These efforts are “one of the most important things that has happened,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, the director of the violence prevention research program at the University of California at Davis. “What has been completely missing is the financial counterweight to the NRA.”
Giffords and Kelly are particularly focused on two areas that President Obama is pushing: an enhanced system of background checks that would prevent more criminals and the mentally ill from buying guns, and a limit on the capacity of magazines.
“A universal background check would have directly affected what happened here in Tucson,” Kelly said, referring to the shooting in which six people were killed and many others, including his wife, were injured. The gunman, Jared L. Loughner, had been suspended from community college for behavioral reasons.
Giffords’ two organizations have already raised millions of dollars from small online donations and from bigger gifts, including a million dollars from Steve and Amber Mostyn, Houston trial lawyers, and a six-figure donation from Bloomberg. The political action committee will hold a fund-raiser before the State of the Union address in Washington at one of Giffords’s favorite restaurants. “We’re going to have to have money to be effective,” Kelly said.
Bloomberg brings some of his substantial fortune to the cause, Dr. Wintemute said, but “what he is not, and what Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly are, are personally compelling representatives of the position that firearm violence need not be tolerated.”
The paradox of Giffords' role is clear. As a gun owner (she and her husband went target shooting just a few months ago) and a Westerner whose recovery has been watched closely across the nation, she is an effective spokeswoman for some changes to gun laws. Yet speaking is still her hardest task.
Kelly, a retired astronaut and former naval aviator who has emerged as a forceful, politically astute advocate for his wife’s cause, fills in the verbal blanks on conference calls and in meetings with donors and members.
Their partnership evokes that of James S. and Sarah Brady, who became advocates for gun control after Brady, then White House press secretary, was shot during an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Like Giffords, Brady was a well-liked and piquant personality whose injuries brought attention to gun violence. In many ways, Giffords seeks to build on the Brady Act, which created a background check for gun buyers, by making that requirement universal, including for private sales. Kelly offers shades of the astronaut John Glenn, who headed up the Emergency Committee for Gun Control after the shooting deaths of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Political operatives on both sides of the aisle in Arizona widely expect Kelly to eventually run for office himself, something he has waved off for now.
Giffords’ liability is in some ways her best asset; her labored speech is a stark reminder that even a member of Congress can be gunned down in broad daylight by someone who is mentally ill and armed with high-capacity magazines. Her short plea to Congress that “you must act” was the most memorable moment of a several-hour Senate hearing. “With just a few words,” said John Feinblatt, Bloomberg’s chief policy adviser, “she was able to express the feelings of a nation.”
Their uphill battle is bringing along lawmakers who feel pressed by the N.R.A. to resist enhanced background checks and limits on high-capacity ammunition, as Ms. Giffords once did.
“Gabby, as a member of Congress, knows where they are coming from,” Mr. Kelly said. “We believe strongly that the Second Amendment affords every American the right to defend their home and defend their property with a gun. But there needs to be reasonable limits.”
Ms. Giffords’s face lit up with joy when her mother, Gloria, a tough Arizona ranch dweller who can talk with great authority about the proper way to remove a mountain lion lurking in the yard, arrived for dinner. The older Ms. Giffords, whose property is still used by Ms. Giffords and Mr. Kelly for target shooting, said she had thought very little about the gun issue until her daughter was shot.
“It’s very difficult to return to some type of peace of mind,” she said. “You feel something has been taken from you, besides the vitality of your child, but also your sense of justice, your sense of rightness in the world.”