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The Straight Story

(48,121 posts)
Sun Jul 7, 2013, 12:10 PM Jul 2013

Giffords tries gentler touch on guns. Meets with bush [View all]

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Giffords took her turn at a shooting range outside Las Vegas the day before, extending her left arm and firing a pistol for the first time since before January 2011, when she was gunned down and nearly killed at a constituent meet-and-greet in Tucson, Arizona.

The visits were part of a carefully orchestrated trip last week to display the couple’s affinity for firearms in states with strong gun traditions. Their hope is to convince fellow gun owners of the virtues of stricter regulations. With Second Amendment rights, they say, come responsibilities.

At each stop — from the nation’s largest public shooting range in Las Vegas to a 1950s-themed diner in Mandan, North Dakota — another message also was clear: We’re not Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York, who preaches gun control and bankrolls television ads assailing lawmakers who cross him.

Instead, Giffords and Kelly employ a softer touch. Armed with fresh polling data showing overwhelming support for expanding background checks in even the reddest pockets of the nation, the couple tells nervous politicians that they can vote “yes” and still keep their jobs.

On Tuesday in Alaska, Kelly trained his attention on Mark Begich, one of four Democratic senators who voted against a background-checks bill in the spring. Kelly’s guest at the shooting range that morning was Tom Begich, the senator’s brother and informal adviser.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/07/world/giffords-tries-gentler-touch-on-guns/#.Udmf_xhEr2Q



Gabby Giffords Meets With George H.W. Bush on Gun Control Tour

Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband former astronaut Mark Kelly had lunch today with former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara at their Kennebunkport, Maine home, Giffords spokeswoman Pia Carusone tells ABC News.

Giffords and Kelly are on their seven-day seven-state “Rights and Responsibilities Tour,” to push for expanded background checks for firearms purchases. They are also being accompanied by some families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting who were with them Friday evening in New Hampshire and today in Maine.

This isn’t the first time Giffords and Bush have met. When Giffords was recovering in a Houston hospital, Bush and his wife Barbara went to visit her. In her 2011 memoir with Kelly, they write that at that point in her recovery she could only say “chicken” to the former president and first lady.

Bush has an interesting history with gun control himself. In 1989, then President George H. W. Bush issued an executive order halting the importation of some semi-automatic firearms after a mass shooting that killed five children and wounded 29 others in California in January 1989. The shooter used an AK-47 assault rifle.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/07/gabby-giffords-meets-with-george-h-w-bush-on-gun-control-tour/

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