Five months ago, Jacquelyn Jackson pulled in to a parking space six places away from the entrance of the Safeway north of Tucson where she had gone shopping Jan. 8, 2011.
She thought she could face down her memories and park a little closer to the store. But Jackson felt her heart beating as she pulled in two spaces over from where she had parked on the day several of her friends were shot, the day one of her friends died.
She sat in the car, doing breathing exercises to calm herself, until she gave up and drove to the far side of the shopping-cart return, the parking- lot demarcation that today offers her a sense of safety.
Jackson, who had once worked in U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ office, was feet away as Jared Loughner, a mentally ill man from Tucson, opened fire with a Glock 19 9mm pistol with a 33-round extended magazine three years ago.
She heard the shooting and rushed toward the violence to help the people she had been chatting with moments before.
In the months that followed, the 50-something Tucson woman thought she would get over the trauma. She thought she would overcome it. She thought she wouldn’t let it change her.
But that was three years ago, when ideas like that seemed like reasonable goals.
That was when the national conversation shifted away from heated debates about painfully balancing state budgets and focused on three issues: mental-health-care resources, the country’s fractured public discourse, and who should have access to guns and under what conditions.
As Giffords lay in a bed at University of Arizona Medical Center struggling to recover from the bullet that pierced her brain, Arizona and the country struggled to create meaning from the mass shooting, to glean from the gore something to hope or to work for.
Three years on, the goodwill has been spread and the civic improvement campaigns enacted. Bills have been written and debated, signed and vetoed. There have been public and private accountings of what happened, why and how.
Today, Arizonans know what has changed and what hasn’t. Early hopes and fears have mellowed into acknowledgments of what simply is: The six dead remain dead. The thirteen wounded live altered lives. The rest of us go forward, knowing how the beginning of this story ends and moving on into the ever-present “after.”
The doctor
Dr. Peter Rhee is the chief of trauma at the UA Medical Center and led the team that treated the six most seriously wounded victims, including Giffords.
At the time, Rhee said that he didn’t realize the media coverage of the shooting and its aftermath would be so intense and that his team’s work would come to mean so much to so many. He said the nation’s response to the shooting has remained unlike its response to any mass shooting since.
“I’ve seen ... mass shootings before and after, and I felt like, through my eyes, the country, and everybody, to this day, has been very, very positive about the response the hospital gave and the respect that they had for Congresswoman Giffords. While conversations were initiated about gun control and mental health, it was done in a positive way.”
Rhee said the national debates about gun rights and mental-health care were more civil out of respect for Giffords than they would have been had the issues been broached in the abstract.
Still unresolved for Rhee is the fact that although his trauma center has a 50 percent traumatic-brain-injury survival rate, five times as high as the national average, top rehabilitation care remains inaccessible for many in Tucson.
“If you have money or are very well-insured, we have rehab centers. But I deal with all of humanity — not just those with a wallet. And if you’re poor, you just get sent home. Most people who don’t have insurance get inferior care.”
The university president
Three years ago, Robert Shelton was at the helm of the University of Arizona, which became the site of vigils and memorial services in the days following the shooting, and of celebrations, conferences and community gatherings later on.
Immediately after the shooting, Shelton feared people were growing less tolerant of each other’s differences, that Loughner was attacking democracy with guns instead of discourse.
His primary concern, however, was for Tuscon and its residents.
“Regardless of its size, it’s really a small university town, in the sense that the focal point of everything is the university,” Shelton said. “I knew we had to bring everyone together to start the healing process, and that’s what ‘Together We Thrive’ was all about.”
Today, Shelton said Tucson has come together stronger than before, but he believes the country is even less tolerant.
“I don’t think it’s gotten any better,” he said. “In fact, it probably has gotten a little worse.”
The senator and friend
The second he heard about the shooting, then-Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., raced from Mesa to Tucson. A longtime friend of Giffords, Flake was overjoyed she’d survived the shooting and spent hours at the hospital, praying for her recovery and offering to help any way he could.
Today, he still prays for Giffords’ improvement, said Flake, now in his first term as a senator.
But other things are have changed.
In April, Flake voted against a bill to expand background checks for gun buyers, a bill supported by Giffords and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly.
Flake was among the 46 opposed. Arizona Sen. John McCain joined three other Republicans and 50 Democrats in supporting the amendment. It needed 60 votes to pass.
Today, Flake said the country needs legislative changes to keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them. Instead of focusing on the gun-access issues Giffords continues to advocate for, Flake focuses on mental-health-care policies.
“There’s broad agreement on the mental-health aspect, but as far as universal background checks there isn’t so much agreement there,” he said. “That’s a tougher issue.
“Better policy and better statutes around mental-health policy will make a difference, and a lot will be due to the advocacy of Gabby and Mark. They’ve been very committed there, and in the end, that will prove valuable.”
Today, Flake is also more vigilant, no longer dismissing threats, because he knows his staff is at risk, even if he doesn’t feel personally imperiled.
“If you’re a member of Congress and you represent your constituents, there’s no way you can always protect yourself, and that’s always in the back of your head.”
The advocate
Peter Michaels is communications director for the National Institute for Civil Discourse at UA. He is also Jacquelyn Jackson’s husband and had arrived at the Safeway before the police tape went up.
In the months following the shooting, he found the experience hard to get over. That’s why he joined the center, hoping that he could do something to change the tone of the nation’s public conversations.
Today, the center, which focuses on civility in Congress, the media and the public, has grown from two people in Tucson to three people in Washington, D.C., and four in Tucson.
“It’s changed a little, not as much as we hoped it would,” he said. “I would’ve thought the discourse in popular culture would’ve improved after the shooting. People talked about it, but nothing really changed.
“For the people who were there and witnessed the shooting, we were changed a great deal. But the rest of the country, not so much.”
The governor
Gov. Jan Brewer, who served with Giffords in the Arizona Legislature, said the shooting marked one of the “darkest days” of her tenure. At the time, she hoped there would be an increased public awareness about mental-health issues.
“It brought more light onto the subject of behavioral health, that certainly we have a responsibility to keep people safe, and that certainly that we need to treat the people that are mentally ill that are creating great devastation in our country,” the governor said.
Since the shooting, bills allocating money for mental-health resources have come up several times in the Legislature, but they have had a difficult time reaching Brewer’s desk.
However, the current state budget, which Brewer signed, earmarks $250,000 for the training of mental-health first-aid instructors.
Bills involving gun rights have had more success reaching her desk. Months after the shooting, Brewer vetoed a pair of bills designed to loosen gun restrictions, including one that would have allowed them on college campuses.
A year later, she vetoed a similar bill that would have allowed guns in public buildings.
The witness
Jacquelyn Jackson said she continues to struggle with what happened that day. She has done breathing work, meditation, yoga and talk therapy.
“I was really close to Gabe (Zimmerman, a Giffords’ aide who died in the shooting), and that’s been really hard to deal with, the sudden loss, the suddenness of how it can all go away.
“You can think it’s all done — it’s been three years — but then, something triggers it. It’s always a goal. You think, ‘I can get over this, I can conquer this.’ But it pretty fundamentally changes you.
“I don’t think you just suddenly overcome it or conquer it. To witness a mass murder is horrible, but when it’s a mass murder of people you care about, it adds to the horror.”
Republic reporters Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Mary Jo Pitzl contributed to this article.