After a 2011 shooting left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak fluently, former Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords turned her attention to gun control advocacy. Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Giffords spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico after receiving her BA in Sociology and Latin American History from Scripps College in California in 1993. She earned an MA in Regional Planning from Cornell University in 1996. She returned to Arizona to become CEO of El Campo Tire Warehouses, a family business started by her grandfather that  was sold to Goodyear in 2000.  

In 2000, Giffords switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat. She was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in 2001; in 2003, she became the youngest woman to be elected to the Arizona Senate. She was elected to the U.S. House in 2005. Giffords had just begun her third term in January 2011 when she was shot in the head outside a grocery store during a public opportunity for constituents to speak directly with her. The shooting, which injured nineteen people and killed six, left Giffords partly paralyzed and with limited speech. In January 2012, she resigned her seat in Congress to focus on her recovery. She also became an outspoken advocate for gun control. In 2013, shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, founded the nonprofit and super PAC organization Americans for Responsible Solutions (ARS; renamed Giffords in 2017) to support pro-gun control candidates. On July 7, 2022, Giffords was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.