Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) was facing threats long before she was shot in the head today at a supermarket in Arizona.
Though it’s not yet clear what motivated the attack on Giffords — though suspect Jared Loughner has left a long internet trail — the attack came after numerous threats against Giffords over the past couple of years.
Giffords’s father Spencer Gifford, 75, told the New York Post that her enemies were “the whole Tea Party.”
But as Zachary Roth also outlined, Giffords has consistently faced threats, mostly for her view on health care reform.
The first widely-publicized incident came in August 2009, when someone dropped a handgun at a town-hall event, which lead her staff to call the police.
After Giffords — who was the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives in 2006 — voted in favor of health care reform, the door to one of her offices was vandalized:
At 2:40 a.m., just a few hours after staff left the building after the late-night vote, the alarm system went off, said spokesman C.J. Karamargin. The panel to the front door and the glass panel alongside it were smashed out. The perpetrator likely had to hop the gated fence to get access to the door, since it’s not viewable from the parking lot.
Giffords was also one of the members of Congress “targeted” by Sarah Palin for their vote on health care. An image posted on Palin’s Facebook page featured crosshairs over the geographical districts of 20 members of Congress.
On Twitter, Palin linked to the page with this message: “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!” Pls see my Facebook page.”
Since the incident today, Palin’s staff removed Gifford’s name from the list on her “Take Back The 20” site, which has since gone down.
Giffords spoke with MSNBC about the threats against her:
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Back in April, Giffords released a statement about the threats against Rep. Raúl Grijalva.
“I am deeply troubled about reports that Congressman Grijalva and members of his staff have been subjected to death threats. This is not how we, as Americans, express our political differences,” Giffords said. “I know from the recent act of vandalism at my Tucson office that intimidation has no place in our representative democracy. Such acts only make it more difficult for us to resolve our differences.”
Then over the summer, during the campaign against her, her opponent held a M16 shooting event in June 2010 which was held for the purpose of helping to “remove Gabrielle Giffords from office.”
