Twelve years after a bullet ripped through the left side of her brain, Gabrielle Giffords speaks mainly in stock phrases and short bursts, conveying meaning with her eyes or a boxer’s swing of her left arm, the one that is still fully mobile. “Enough is enough!” she might say. Or: “Be passionate! Be courageous!”

But in an interview at the headquarters of the gun safety group that bears her name, amid a string of mass shootings in California, there was something more that Ms. Giffords wanted to say. Asked what Americans should know about her, “I’m getting better,” she said haltingly, laboring over each word. “Slowly, I’m getting better. Long, hard haul, but I’m getting better. Our lives can change so quickly. Mine did when I was shot. I’ve never given up hope. I chose to make a new start, to move ahead, to not look back. I’m relearning so many things — how to walk, how to talk — and I’m fighting to make the country safer. It can be so difficult. Losses hurt; setbacks are hard. But I tell myself: Move ahead.”

Ms. Giffords, 52, who goes by Gabby, is arguably America’s most famous gun violence survivor. She had come to the group’s headquarters in Washington for an update and a strategy session. The timing of her visit underscored two competing truths: The gun safety movement she helps lead is stronger than ever. But the nation’s gun violence epidemic is worsening.

In part because of the efforts of Giffords, the group Ms. Giffords and her husband founded 10 years ago, so-called red flag laws aimed at keeping guns away from potentially dangerous people have now been enacted in 19 states and the District of Columbia; states adopted dozens of new gun safety laws in 2022 alone. Breaking nearly 30 years of partisan gridlock, Congress passed a modest package of gun safety measures last year. Democrats, who once feared the gun rights lobby, are now running on gun safety platforms.

But already this year, 84 people have died in 49 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as those in which four or more people are shot or killed.

A divided Congress means there is little hope for ambitious reforms in Washington. The Supreme Court, now with a six-justice conservative majority, ruled last year that Americans have a broad right to carry guns, making it harder for states to impose restrictions.

Ghost guns — untraceable firearms assembled from components bought online — are proliferating. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls firearm deaths “a significant and growing public health problem.” In 2021, 81 percent of homicides and 55 percent of suicides involved guns. “Without the laws we’ve passed, even more people would be dead,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, who led the push for last year’s package of gun safety measures. “But right now, we’re losing the race. We’re passing laws at a quick rate, but not fast enough to keep up with the pace of new weapons in communities and in homes.”

Ms. Giffords is an optimist, but also a realist. In written answers to questions — an accommodation she sought because conversation is difficult — she conceded that persuading Congress to pass sweeping laws, like banning assault weapons or requiring gun manufacturers to make weapons with safety devices like fingerprint locks, “will be tough.”

But she likened the effort to her own painstaking recovery — a fight back that will never get her where she once was. “Progress,” she said, “happens inch by inch.” Each day in the United States, upward of 200 people are wounded by guns and more than 110 are killed, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, another advocacy group, which has declared the first week in February as National Gun Violence Survivors Week. The figures include suicides, homicides, accidents and police shootings.

Keenon James, who runs the group’s survivor network, is among millions of Americans touched by gun violence; his older brother was shot and killed in 1993. He said Ms. Giffords had put a powerful spotlight on the experiences of survivors.

“She is absolutely a symbol of resilience,” he said. “That experience may have changed her, but it has not stopped her.”

One thing it did stop, however, is her political career. Her husband, the former astronaut Mark Kelly, is now a Democratic senator from Arizona, a job to which she once aspired.

In Congress, Ms. Giffords was a centrist Democrat who opposed the death penalty but supported gun rights. She owned a 9-millimeter Glock to protect herself after two home burglaries. In recent years, her group has sought to enlist gun owners; eight states now have chapters of Gun Owners for Safety, a Giffords initiative.

In a sign of the political realities she faces, Ms. Giffords’s home state of Arizona is not among them. The state does not have a red flag law and allows people 21 or older to carry a concealed, loaded firearm in public without a permit. Mr. Kelly said it would be a “tough proposition” to get gun safety measures through the State Legislature. And he has not been especially vocal about gun safety as a senator.

“My style on this stuff is to show up and do the work here,” he said last week during an interview in his Senate office, “not be on TV talking about it.”

The movement was not especially sophisticated before Sandy Hook, said Josh Horwitz, who worked for and later ran the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence for nearly 30 years before joining the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Giffords and Everytown, he said, employed a “political campaign approach,” harnessing online fund-raising and social media in a way that enabled gun safety activists to finally compete with the National Rifle Association.

“The N.R.A. had this competitive advantage because they had all these gun stores and gun shows recruiting for them every day — ‘Join the N.R.A.!’” he said. “And for the first time, we were able to go head-to-head with them, collecting new members.”

But the fallout from Sandy Hook did not result in new gun safety laws at the federal level. And the package of gun safety measures passed by Congress last year received mixed reviews from experts. Lawrence O. Gostin, an expert in public health law at Georgetown University, called it “weak sauce and window dressing,” adding that he feared Ms. Giffords would never win her fight.

“It’s not winnable in her lifetime, and I say that with enormous tears in my eyes,” he said. “It is getting worse, because we’re becoming completely numb to it, and there’s a certain inevitability to mass shootings that we think is unfixable. And once you think it’s unfixable, it is unfixable.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg
The NYTimes