“It sounds simple to raise fingers and squeeze hands,” a neurosurgeon told a reporter for the Times, who’d asked about Gabrielle Giffords. But it isn’t, the doctor said; it’s a complicated thing, and implies a good deal about the state your brain is in. Moving your fingers to a certain part of a pistol and squeezing the trigger; hearing someone ask you to hold on and hold tighter, and doing so. Giffords, thankfully, has begun to do the second of those, and is responding to other simple-sounding commands, which means that the bullet through her brain may have taken a lucky path. As for Jared Loughner, the alleged gunman, we don’t know what command or call he was answering—from within himself, from the clatter in the culture, or from some particular voice—and he isn’t talking to investigators so far. (There are clues: see George Packer and Jill Lepore for more on that.) According to the affidavit accompanying the charges filed against Loughner, he had a safe holding “an envelope with handwriting on the envelope stating ‘I planned ahead,’ and ‘My assassination’ with the name ‘Giffords,’ along with what appears to be Loughner’s signature.”
But one would rather think of other hands: Daniel Hernandez, Giffords’s twenty-year-old intern, had worked in a hospital, and knew enough, when she was hit, to sit her up so she wouldn’t choke and put “my bare hand” on her wound to keep the blood from coming out. (Safeway butchers then brought him some of their clean smocks, which was brilliant.) And one of Hernandez’s hands was in Giffords’s: “She was obviously in a lot of pain, so I let her know to squeeze my hand as hard as she needed to.” Andrew Sullivan called him an “instant role model.” (Hernandez is openly gay.) He is getting a lot of credit for keeping Giffords alive.
Even pickpocketing fingers can be helpful: from an interview Patricia Maisch gave to FoxNews, about how Loughner was subdued:
“Pulled it from his pocket”—also brilliant. Maisch, by the way, is sixty-one years old.
And Christina-Taylor Green was nine years old, and is dead. It is hard to stop thinking about her. In some measure that’s because, having spent a good part of the spring and summer watching Little League, I can very easily imagine her playing second base—her regular position as the only girl on her Canyon del Oro Little League team. She came from a baseball family: her grandfather managed the Phillies, Mets, and Yankees, and her father, John Green, is a Dodgers scout. John told reporters that Christina wanted to be the first woman to play in the major leagues; she was also considering a career in public service. She was born on September 11, 2001, and might have done or become just about anything. (One thinks of the frequent complaint about the scarcity of good people who are drawn to political careers; another loss.) She was brought to the event by a neighbor her mother called a kind of unofficial aunt, who knew that Christina liked politics. That neighbor was also wounded; one hopes that she never ever persuades herself that she did anything wrong or reckless by bringing Christina to meet her congresswoman. If more neighbors thought to bring more little girls to events like that, the gender balance in Congress, and many other things, might be better.
Youth is not a requirement for tragedy, of course. Another victim, Dorwan Stoddard, was seventy-six—sixty-seven years older than Christina. He reportedly shielded his wife with his own body when the shooting started. She was wounded but will recover; he is dead. According to the Washington Post,
Never too late to take someone’s hand.
Read more New Yorker coverage of the Arizona shooting and its aftermath.
Courtroom sketch: Bill Robles/AP
