Meeting Gabby Giffords

Yesterday, I had the rare privilege of meeting Gabby Giffords at a small, intimate gathering — and I haven’t stopped thinking about her since. (Special thanks to Jennifer Miner for making this moment possible.)

There are people who survive, and then there are people who transform. Gabby Giffords is the latter.

On January 8, 2011, a gunman opened fire at a constituent event Giffords was holding outside a Tucson grocery store. He shot her in the head, killed six people, and wounded twelve others. Her trauma surgeon called it “a devastating wound that traveled the entire length of the brain on the left side.” Most people would never have been seen in public again. Giffords was back on the House floor seven months later, casting a vote on the debt-ceiling bill to a standing ovation.

She did not disappear into grief. She didn’t harden into bitterness. She did something far more difficult and far more rare: she let the wound become the work.

The work that followed

She resigned from Congress in January 2012 to focus on her recovery — and then quietly, methodically, with halting speech and fierce determination, created a movement. In 2013, in the wake of Sandy Hook, she and her husband Mark Kelly founded what is now GIFFORDS, a 90-person organization with a lobbying arm, a law center, and a super PAC dedicated to ending gun violence. She has helped pass more than 525 significant gun safety laws across 49 states. In 2022, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She did all of this while relearning how to speak.

Here’s the number that stops me cold: since the day Gabby Giffords was shot, more than 110 Americans are shot every single day. In 2024 alone, over 44,000 people died from gun violence in the US. The rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011.

Gabby didn’t choose to be a symbol. But she chose — every single day, in therapy rooms and Senate hearing rooms and on stages where every word costs her enormous effort — to use her story to fight for yours.

What will it take

So I ask you: what does it take for a message like this to stick? Not just with those of us already paying attention, but with the lawmakers, the voters, the communities that hold the actual power to change this? What does enough look like? What will it take?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Because if Gabby Giffords can rebuild her voice after having half her brain devastated by a bullet — the least we can do is use ours.

Renee Miller is founder and Chief Creative Director of The Miller Group.