The following is an original production of AZPM News January 8th, 2011, Tucson was rocked by a mass shooting that left six dead and 13 with gunshot injuries, including then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

It's a part of Southern Arizona history that at times is hard to come to grips with and many are still processing to this day.

I'm David Lee and The Press Room starts now.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) January 8th, 2011 was a day that started out like so many others, but ended in tragedy.

19 people were shot outside of a Safeway grocery store, many coming to see then Congresswoman Gabby Giffords for "Congress on your Corner."

15 years later, we look back, but also look forward.

Once again, we remember the 13 people who were wounded and we ring the bell for the six people who died that day.

Christina Taylor-Green.

Dorothy "Dot" Morris.

Judge John Roll.

Phyllis Schneck.

Dorwan Stoddard.

And Gabriel Zimmerman.

You're like, I think every one of us, we know exactly where we were on January 8th.

When you think back to what that day was like, how from the early reports to as we got updated information throughout the course of the day of what had really happened, who was with us, who we'd lost.

What's important for so many is the remembrance of not just what occurred that day, but how this community responded.

Even at the Safeway that day, the people that ran towards the incident and ran towards this very difficult situation and how the community came together.

What I realized at that moment is this didn't just happen to me and Gabby and those that were immediately involved.

This happened to everybody and people were there for their own healing.

(soft music) There was some, I recall being at some early meetings where there were discussions about what might a memorial look like?

Where might it be?

We spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted this to say.

The architect and designers interviewed a lot of community members, as well as survivors and families of the victims.

And what they picked up on was how we came together.

Everyone seemed to have had some connection to what went on and people say, well, what's different about Tucson?

Well, that tragedy illustrated what's different about Tucson.

The community came together and literally embraced everyone that was involved.

So the shape of the memorial is like arms reaching around.

So it reflects how the community came together in an embrace around those of us affected and around each other.

A Tucson mom, Mary Reed was at Safeway on January 8th with her family.

AZPM's L.M.

Boyd spoke to her and found out how her life changed forever on that day.

Mary Reed took her husband and two children to meet their congresswoman on January 8th, 2011.

Her teenage daughter, Emma McMahon, worked as a page for representative Gabrielle Giffords, but never had the chance to take a photo with her.

Mary's husband and son went to the nearby Walgreens just before a gunman opened fire on the line of people waiting to meet their elected official.

Mary was the last person to be shot.

She took three bullets while shielding her daughter with one still lodged in her spine.

15 years later, Mary continues to share her story and push for change.

I've always owned shotguns.

I am a native Texan, which means in the year I graduated at least, if you couldn't walk in high heels and field strip a firearm, they didn't let you graduate.

I never actually thought about gun laws or the people that were murdered or completed suicide with a gun.

I just, it wasn't anything I thought about.

I thought about mom things.

I thought about what's for dinner and is the laundry clean.

Afterwards, I had a whole new lens.

I saw in my children's eyes the loss of their childhood.

That day I can point to that minute where my daughter was pulling out pieces of other people out of her long blonde hair and my son was holding bloody rags on my wounds.

I could see the safety of their world and in that moment, it was heartbreaking.

And it's the heartbreak that stays with me.

Every day, I wake up with a heavy heart.

125 people, give or take, are affected by gun violence each and every day.

It's like this horrible drumbeat that I wake up to.

For me, it's really very simple.

If you are legally able to own a weapon, pass a background check, get what you want.

But we as gun owners should put pressure on people to store those weapons correctly.

Having a community safe from gun violence is not a political point of view.

It's what we all want.

I spent 14 years working so that the devastation of gun violence could be adequately communicated to our elected officials.

But people continue to die.

The mama bears in this world need to step up and run for office because their children may be affected by this very real epidemic.

On January 8th, when the shooting started, I threw my then 17-year-old daughter against the wall and covered her.

And the gunman tried to shoot her through me.

I do this advocacy as a letter of apology to all of those children who have been affected by gun violence because we are failing our community by not addressing this very serious public health issue.

L.M., first things first, how are Mary and her daughter doing?

Mary said best, she wakes up each day and you don't have to look too far in the headlines to see something about gun violence.

And that weighs heavy on her.

But she, like her daughter and the rest of her family, continue to rely on each other.

They rely on their community for support.

And Mary tells me that her daughter is doing great.

She went to college, she got married last year, and in the spring she's expecting a baby.

All right, congratulations for her on that.

Is Mary hopeful or cynical in terms of gun violence now moving forward?

That's a great question.

I think it's a mixture of both.

For Mary to have been working in advocacy as long as she has, you have to hold on to hope.

So she's definitely an optimistic person.

But speaking with her, I learned that she's making a pivot from her last 14 years of advocacy.

And I think seeing the lack of results, her work in communicating survivors' stories to elected officials has not been as effective as she's hoped.

Like she said, 125 people, she said are affected by gun violence, to be clear, that's 125 people are killed by gun violence a day, looking at 2019 to 2023 numbers, according to the CDC.

So she's realized that she wants to make more change.

She's pivoting to working directly with candidates as opposed to elected officials.

She feels that dialogue will be more effective during election season.

Okay, we have just about a minute left here.

Taking a look at the stats, have you learned anything?

Has she learned anything over the last several years?

Well, I can tell you recently I've seen some headlines about how there's been a dip in gun violence in the last year.

To be clear, we are now going back to pre-pandemic levels.

So we are still at record highs in gun violence.

And specifically in Arizona, in 2019, there were 15 gun deaths per 100,000 people.

And looking at 2023, which is the most recent CDC data that we have, it jumps up to 19 per 100,000 people.

So there is an increase that we know.

And I mean, just recently we had that shooting at the Goodwill in Tucson where two employees were robbed and shot, one of them dead, one hospitalized.

So we do see that problem persist.

All right, L.M.

Boyd, really great reporting.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

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Welcome back to The Press Room.

Joining me now at the table, Christopher Conover, former AZPM news director and reporter, Jim Nintzel from the Tucson Sentinel, Mark Kimble, former reporter, and who also was a Giffords staffer on January 8th.

And from the Arizona Daily Star, Tim Steller.

Thank you very much all for being here.

You know, when I look back at 2011, January 8th, for me, I was working in Salinas, California.

I was on the assignment desk and the news came across.

We started to monitor it.

We started to watch it, but for us, it was just part of the news coverage, unfortunately, for that day.

Afterwards, we did our typical stories to move it forward, things like that, but it was very different from there.

For folks here in Tucson, it still stands out.

It resonates with them.

When you talk to folks today, and when you think about that day now, how has that been, what are folks saying, I guess, today?

You know, I talked to Ron Barber and Pam Simon, who were staffers alongside Mark at Gifford's office in those days.

And Ron is now involved with an organization called the Arizona Democracy Resilience Network, which is designed to try to tone down political rhetoric and head off political violence.

And he says, he's sad to say that these days you are still seeing, and perhaps even worse, you know, the threats against election workers that we saw here in Pima County just in the last election, because people saw a video of people emptying out a ballot drop box and thought it was some sort of election fraud.

And it generated all these threats against Pima County election workers.

So there's certainly concerns still about political violence and perhaps even heightened fears about political violence, which is sad to see.

Talking with Pam Simon, she talked, but she's been real involved in anti-gun or anti-gun violence legislation.

And she says, you know, there are hills and valleys in that effort.

And some days it seems like things are going well.

And some days it seems like things are not going well on that front.

And this is a time in particular where things are not going so well on that front.

Mark, what about you?

Well, for me personally, I guess I can say that it was the time before it and the time after it.

It was obviously a significant event in my life.

And I think in a significant event in Tucson history, but sadly as the years go on, there have been so many other mass shootings, so many other examples of political violence that they kind of all just meld together.

And it's hard for people, I think in Tucson, but around the country to really pull what happened here out of what happened so many other times since then.

Christopher, would you echo that as well?

I would.

And if you look at Tucson as a whole, we've grown numbers wise, just check the census.

And it is a transient town, especially because of the university and the military bases and things like that.

People come and go and a lot of people weren't here.

Or a lot of people who we think of having been here for a long time were 15 years younger.

And maybe were only teenagers at the time or very young adults.

So they don't have the same memories of it that those of us who were here and working those days do.

I think for those of us who were involved with the coverage and knew people, yeah, January 8th still rings for us, but less and less for the community as a whole, as Mark was saying, as we get away from it.

Tim.

Yeah, it strikes me that, correct, those who were here, for those who were here, it is one of those watershed moments, as Mark was saying.

If I think back, it was just such a shocking Saturday morning, beautiful Saturday morning.

I was taking my son to a soccer game.

And then in the aftermath, okay, so there's this, awful day, and in the aftermath, the thing that I remember along with doing the work was going by every day, the Giffords office at Swan and Pima, I believe, where that was one of two places where people were constantly dropping off bouquets and other memorials or decorations just to honor the people who had been affected.

And if you think back to that time, it was a community in shock.

And I think that still resonates to, it's a relatively small town when you settle in here, but everybody knows everybody.

And so everybody was one to two connections away from somebody who was at the event or affected.

So to that extent, I think it still resonates, but of course, time has moved on.

Well, and as you said, the community really came together.

There were people dropping things off at the Giffords office.

The front of the hospital was just completely covered.

Memorials.

Littered.

27,000 people showed up at McKale for the ceremony there a couple of days later.

It brought the community together, if only for a moment, but it certainly brought the community together for that time.

Is that something that is happening more and more often when there's that mass shooting effect.

You mentioned a little bit about it.

People galvanize around the community and feel it right away.

But then as time goes on, people move out of the area.

I don't wanna say they forget, but maybe some do.

How do you, I guess, reconcile with all of that?

I think it's normal.

Tucson is now part of a very select group of cities that have experienced this, and we have that in common with a number of other cities.

But every week, that group grows and grows and grows.

It was, when I think back on it, these three gentlemen, I talked to all of them, either that day or within a day or two later.

And they were as much affected by it as I was, because we all know each other.

And all three of these people knew Gabby very well.

And know Gabby very well.

So it was a very seminal moment in history for Tucson.

And I hope we don't have to have another such event to make people remember how we came together.

Jim, what do you think the responsibility is for the press in all of this?

Whether it's covering a large event shooting like this, versus maybe the weekly shooting that happens in town.

Do we have a responsibility to kind of set the tone or be a part of the agenda?

Well, I think that gun violence is an ongoing issue within the community.

We saw just this recently, the shooting at the Goodwill store that unfortunately claimed a life.

And it's, again, for the people who are affected by it, it shatters, the ripples move outward.

It has an impact on the individuals who are affected.

In the case of this, you had six people killed and 13 more wounded and obviously very high profile because of the fact that it happened to a Congress person.

So that's naturally gonna draw more attention as because of the high level celebrity involved in the whole thing.

But I think that gun violence is unfortunately happening in our community far, far too often.

Okay, I'll certainly turn this over to all of you.

But Tim, we'll start out with you.

There was a lot of response externally from Tucson that happened to help heal, I guess.

What was that like seeing so many people now focus on Tucson right after this?

Well, as a reporter at the time, it was at times disorienting because we're not used to having, being the focus of national and international news attention.

We were at the time actually operating out of the old Tucson Citizen newsroom at the Star.

We were over there and getting calls that day and for days thereafter from national news organizations looking for information, which we may or may not have had.

Then it became a competitive thing as it does.

Everybody's looking for more information.

But I felt we were able to kind of buckle down and concentrate on a few themes that came out of this, which was helpful for us to not get distracted by the big national thing.

I mean, obviously the big event that happened afterward was the president coming to town and giving a very moving speech and visiting people such as Ron Barber in the hospital.

It was just, everybody was still in shock.

And he, if you think back to it, he demonstrated something that was very valuable, which was that presidential Consoler- in-Chief role.

Christopher, yeah, go ahead.

Say one of the things I remember was that day, there was a news conference with the sheriff's department and I set up in my gear.

We were obviously doing radio and TV and I set up the radio gear and I was sitting in the front row because our cords weren't that long.

And there was a woman sitting next to me in the front row who I didn't know.

She looked kind of familiar, but crazy day.

And she leaned over to me very politely and said, "Oh, I was saving that seat for my husband.

"He's in the back getting a briefing from the sheriff.

"Would you mind moving over?"

I was like, "Oh, sure, no problem.

"I moved over."

And her husband, Congressman Flake came out and sat down.

And he was holding, I believe, a similar event at the same time when the shooting happened, closed down the event and came down here.

Kind of typical Jeff Flake from what I've known of the then Congressman, but a Republican.

And we saw people coming together.

Were there people from the other party who said things?

Of course, but at least as we were saying, for that brief time, the community kind of came together.

And I remember when Congresswoma Giffords made her return to the floor, everybody was there.

And for a moment, the letters went away at the end of the name.

What do you think the legacy of all of this is and will be moving forward?

Boy, I'm not sure I'm smart enough to say that.

As Jim pointed out, Congressman Barber is involved in an effort to try to cool the political temperature.

Gabby is involved in an anti-gun group that has her name on it.

And I don't know what, if this is just one blip in time, and if it's gonna change anything, I certainly would like to think it would.

These gentlemen were talking about the media response.

And I remember very clearly that day, my blackberry was constantly ringing and I answered it as often as I could.

And then the end of the day, I went home and I had over 350 missed calls.

So it's hard to even remember how horribly busy it was.

And the huge national interest brought to Tucson for several days for unfortunately the wrong reason.

Jim, just a little bit of time left here.

Your thoughts?

We've certainly seen, as Mark pointed out, Gabby get involved in this Giffords movement.

She's supposed to be in Washingt on January 8th on the House floor.

Whether she'll have a chance to speak or not remains to be seen.

Her husband, of course, is now a US Senator.

He was at a town hall recently and he said that Gabby was supposed to be the politician in the family.

He said if he had been shot, maybe she would have become an astronaut.

(laughing) She says she would, is what he said.

But yeah, I think it launched an effort, at least among some local folks, to get really engaged in the effort to prevent gun violence for sure.

So yeah, and remember, in Decemb 2013, Mark Kelly was at an event at the Safeway where this shooting occurred.

That was when Americans for Responsible Solutions, which was the forerunner to what's currently called Giffords, that was the month it was formed.

And that was his political coming out at that moment.

He had been behind the scenes for more than two years, almost three years at that stage, and finally got involved with this effort to pass better, or stronger gun laws and reduce gun violence.

Of course, now today, he's this high profile US senator, possibly a presidential candidate.

We'll see about that.

I'm sure you wouldn't trade that for going back in time and having this not happen at all.

All right, gentlemen, I have to end our conversation here right now, but thank you all for being here.

Christopher Conover, Jim Nintzel.

We have Tim Steller and, of course, Mark Kimble.

Thank you so much again.

And thank you all for joining us here on The Press Room.

I'm David Lee.

We'll see you next week.