It has been a year and a month since the day the shots pierced the heart of Arizona on January 8, 2011. In all, 19 victims were shot. Six lives were taken and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords gravely wounded. Friends, families, a state and a nation were torn at their emotional seams.

The news crews came for their live shots, talking heads talked, pundits opined, quick clues to a deeper cause and meaning sought and catharsis stated to have been reached in a stirring memorial led by an eloquent President. Over time, the initial raw wounds seemed to merge into the amazing evolving story of strength, resilience and recovery of Gabby Giffords. And, to be sure, there are few parallels in public life to the resilience and recovery of Gabby, it has been stunning, heartwarming and inspirational.

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, saying she must do the right thing for Arizona and herself in order to continue her healing, will resign from Congress this week.

Jared Loughner, accused of shooting Gabrielle Giffords and killing 6 people in a rampage in Tuscon this January, has been ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial by a federal judge today.

Giffords is living proof of the potential for cognitive rehabilitation therapy. It’s an expensive procedure. But the Pentagon budget, let’s say, has a few bucks to spare in reserve. Rather than putting that money into buying the 1,592nd armored carrier or 15th prototype stealth fighter that will simply be mothballed, that money ought to go to fix the soldiers who are wounded in battle. And there’s nobody better to take up that fight than Gabrielle Giffords.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, just two months from the tragic shooting in Tuscon where she suffered a bullet wound to the head, is doing so well in rehabilitation in Houston, Texas, that she may attend the shuttle launch of her husband, Mark Kelly, on April 19.

What is going on here is a power grab, pure and simple. And not just in the Loughner case, but in a much broader federal versus state sense.

Less remarked-upon is the kinds of systemic issues with public policy that led to the shooting in the first place: the breakdown of the US mental health system, and the ease with which people with intent to kill large numbers of people can get the weapons they need for that purpose. This has become the dog that didn’t bark in this tragedy. One of the victims of the shooting in Tucson was Gabe Zimmerman, a staffer for Giffords. His fiancee is one of the few to actually identify a problem related to the attack, and propose a solution.

In addition to the lack of discussion of the economic crisis, particularly the forgotten foreclosure crisis, one thing that struck many observers of the State of the Union address was no mention of gun safety, just a couple weeks after the Tucson shooting rampage and the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Jared Lee Loughner was arraigned today at the Federal Courthouse in Phoenix, AZ for one count of attempted assassination in the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and two counts of attempted murder for shooting two of her staffers, Ron Barber and Pam Simon.

There was a frightening heaviness to the days following the Tucson shootings. Some years ago, Italo Calvino perfectly described the feeling I had last week: At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no [...]