During the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the gun-control legislation introduced in the wake of the Newtown massacre, Illinois senator Dick Durbin issued an apology the husband of former Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords, Mark Kelly, for the Senate’s failure to convene a such a hearing sooner.
“I say with some regret, there should have been a hearing just like this right after your wife, one of our own, a member of Congress, was shot point blank in the face at a town meeting in Tucson, Arizona,” he said. “I’m sorry it has taken two years to convene this hearing, but it took Newtown, Connecticut to finally bring us to our senses and to open this national conversation.”
Giffords sustained critical brain injuries in a January 2011 shooting that that took the lives of six others.