“You turned a civics lesson into a nightmare,” Suzi Hileman said to Jared Loughner yesterday, at a sentencing hearing in a court in Arizona. Loughner and Hileman had both showed up for a Congress on Your Corner event in Tucson, Arizona, in January, 2011. “We brought wives, husbands, friends, and children that morning. You brought a gun,” Hileman said, [according to press reports](file://localhost/.%20http/::www.azfamily.com:news:local:Watch-LIVE-Officials-and-victims-speak-out-following-Loughner-sentencing-177944821.html). The child Hileman had brought was her nine-year-old neighbor, Christina-Taylor Green, who had just run (and won) her first political campaign, for her elementary school’s student council. When Loughner began shooting at Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and anyone else he could see, Hileman shielded Christina with with her body. By the time Loughner was subdued, she was badly wounded; Christina was dead, as were five others.
Giffords survived, narrowly, a gun wound to her head. Like Hileman and other victims, she was in court yesterday, with her husband, Mark Kelly, an astronaut. He spoke for her; she has, laboriously, regained her ability to speak, but it was hard. “Gabby is a people person. If she wasn’t born with her name, someone surely would’ve given it to her. Now, she struggles to deliver each sentence,” Kelly said. He added that she “struggles to walk, her right arm is paralyzed, she’s partially blind.” He was laying out, in frank terms, what one sensed but put aside when watching Giffords lead the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democratic National Convention this year in Charlotte. Onstage, she had overwhelmed the audience with the sense of what politics, a commitment to public life, had meant to her, and still did; but it was also clear how very badly she’d been hurt.
Loughner’s victims had asked that prosecutors not seek the death penalty. “You have been given a gift, whether you realize it or not,” the prosecutor, Wally Kleindienst, told him. Loughner is clearly mentally ill; he just as clearly will never leave prison. The judge sentenced him to a hundred and forty years in jail. But there are other numbers to take comfort in. When Loughner shot Giffords she was one of seventy-two women in Congress. In the next Congress, thanks to the election Tuesday, there will be eighty-one, and twenty women in the Senate—more than there have ever been. That number will certainly grow. Looking at the acceptance speeches and victories on Tuesday night, many girls were learning civics lessons.
Photograph by Ross D. Franklin/AP.
