Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, a new documentary about the former congresswoman turned gun control activist, opens on the National Mall dotted with bouquets like a somber orchard – 40,000 white flowers for lives lost to gun violence in the US in 2019, 5,000 orange ones for the increase in 2020. She walks with a limp and a cane, the result of partial paralysis on her right side following an attempted assassination in 2011. Her face, altered by the injuries from a gunshot wound to the head and several life-saving surgeries, bears a grim recognition.
Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, directed by RBG film-makers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, is as much about America’s unrelenting and preventable epidemic of gun violence, for which Giffords is both a dauntless activist and grim statistic, as well as Giffords’s improbable recovery. It has been 11 years since a gunman opened fire at one of her constituent meet-and-greets, killing six and leaving Giffords in critical condition with a bullet through the left hemisphere of her brain, where language function resides.
