Arizona and Guns Go Together: State Laws Give Firearms Owners Legal Cover

Arizona’s gun laws are on national display following Saturday’s shooting, but whether they’re “weak” or “strong” depends on whom you ask. According to an article today in the Los Angeles Times, “Arizona has some of the weakest gun-control laws in the nation.” (Emphasis ours.) Put that way, it’s certainly true…

Talk About Bad Timing: Phoenix Councilman Claude Mattox Solicits Political Support One Day After Congresswoman Gunned Down in Tucson

Events across the nation were postponed in the wake of the Tucson shooting massacre that claimed the lives of six people and injured 14 others others, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The nation paused as it mourned the senseless killings, recognizing it certainly wasn’t the time for politics as usual. Even…

Gabrielle Giffords’ Recovery Chances Boosted by Advances in Brain-Trauma Surgery Since JFK’s Assassination in 1963

Wikimedia Commons Gabrielle Giffords, following her 2010 election victory. ​In the aftermath of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday, many people are wondering about her chances of recovery. They’re the best they can be, given advances in brain surgery, according to a neurosurgeon from Barrow Neurological Institute.Giffords was…

Tuscon Artists and Writers Blog About Shooting

As news media across the nation turned to the Web to report updates about Saturday’s tragic shooting, Tucson residents went online to vent their personal perspectives.What follows is a list of links to Tucsonans’ political frustrations, personal mourning, and collective grief expressed through the blogosphere.A Tucson writer for the Arizona Jewish Post…

Tucson Schools Often Turn Away Mental Health Training, Expert Says

While details are still trickling in as to the exact extent mental illness — and a lack of reporting/intervention — may have played a role in preventing the tragedy in Tucson, one local mental health professional tells New Times that Tucson school administrators regularly turn away help from a program designed to…

Heroes Who Restrained Jared Loughner Probably Prevented Gunman From Killing Self

Four people who restrained murder suspect Jared Loughner during Saturday’s shooting rampage in Tucson may have prevented him from killing not only additional innocent bystanders who assembled to meet Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that morning, but himself. Based on Loughner’s often-incoherent ramblings on social media Web sites, it seems the four…

Palin and Tea Party Rhetoric Was Not the Reason Gabrielle Giffords Was Attacked — America’s Treatment of Mental Illness Is to Blame

The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the incidental execution of Arizona’s Chief federal judge, the collateral killing of five bystanders, including a child, and the deranged wounding of 13 politically curious civilians is not the result of the First Amendment’s perversion by talk radio, Sarah Palin or the recent emergence of…

Gabrielle Giffords’ Murdered Aide Gabe Zimmerman — A Chat Last Spring

I was standing at the border “fence” down in Palominas last spring chatting with John Ladd Jr., an articulate and outspoken cattle rancher with no love for the federal government, Barack Obama, or anything with the phrase “illegal immigrant” attached to it. I was reporting this story, “Badlands,” which took…