Excerpt
Jared L. Loughner was sentenced Thursday to seven consecutive terms of life in prison at a court hearing punctuated by raw emotion as former Representative Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark E. Kelly, for the first time confronted the man who shot her in the head during a rampage last year that left 6 dead and 12 others wounded.
Ms. Giffords, her right arm in a sling, stared at Mr. Loughner as Mr. Kelly delivered his defiant remarks before a packed courtroom, from a dais a few feet from the defendant’s chair.
“By making death and producing tragedy, you sought to extinguish the beauty of life, to diminish potential, to strain love and to cancel ideas,” Mr. Kelly said. “You tried to create for all of us a world as dark and evil as your own. But remember it always: You failed.”
Mr. Loughner’s punishment — in addition to the life terms, he was sentenced to 140 years in prison — came as no surprise. It was a condition of the guilty plea he entered on Aug. 7, admitting to the shootings and bringing to an end a case that had prompted much soul-searching about mental health treatment and the country’s gun laws.
From the bench in Federal District Court, Judge Larry A. Burns said he was not going to make “political statements,” that he was just “a single federal judge” who had “no intention to change the law.” Still, he questioned the wisdom of allowing the unrestricted sale of high-capacity magazines, like the one Mr. Loughner used to carry out his crimes.
“I don’t understand the social utility of allowing citizens to have magazines with 30 bullets in them,” Judge Burns said.
For Mr. Kelly, though, who has been Ms. Giffords’s unrelenting companion and her voice as she has struggled to articulate her words since the shooting, the politics of gun control is the “elephant in the room.” He denounced politicians who are “afraid to do something as simple as have a meaningful debate about our gun laws,” singling out Gov. Jan Brewer, whom he called “feckless,” and the Legislature, which “thought it appropriate to busy itself naming an official Arizona state gun just weeks after this tragedy.”
Mr. Kelly went on, “After Columbine, after Virginia Tech, after Tucson and after Aurora,” the Colorado suburb where a gunman killed 12 and wounded 58 in a movie theater in July, “we have done nothing.”
A spokesman for the governor said in a statement that “on this solemn occasion,” Ms. Brewer “isn’t interested in engaging in politics.”
Ms. Giffords did not say anything, only stroking her husband’s back when they slowly made their way back to their seats.
On Jan. 8, 2011, Mr. Loughner, now 24, arrived at a constituents meeting hosted by Ms. Giffords, then a member of the House of Representatives, in a shopping center parking lot. He had a loaded Glock 9-millimeter pistol and carried 60 extra rounds of ammunition. In less than 30 seconds, he fired 31 shots.
Onlookers tackled and restrained him when he paused to reload. One of them was Pamela Simon, an aide and close friend of Ms. Giffords’s who was shot by Mr. Loughner and was one of seven victims to speak in court.
Ms. Simon, who taught at the middle school Mr. Loughner had attended, said she remembered him as “a kid who loved music.” On Thursday, she told him, “You remind us that too often we either do not notice the signs of mental illness, or we just choose to look away.”
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