This past weekend, many different corners of Tucson gathered to remember the events and tragic loss of the Jan. 8, 2011 shooting that took the lives of six people in our community. It also severely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who pledged she’d work to honor the people wounded and killed that day (Please read her essay, “My Pledge,” on the Range).

At one gathering this weekend, Congresswoman Martha McSally, a Republican who now holds Giffords’ seat, addressed a Tucson crowd about the legislation she recently introduced so the Jan. 8 memorial gets a designation as a national memorial.

I can’t say that I’ve absolutely disagreed with everything McSally has championed since her election, but I’ve been disappointed. I was disappointed in her ridiculous sheep-like votes against funding Planned Parenthood. And then there’s her insipid legislation that supposedly strengthens background checks for gun purchases, but according to critics actually makes it easier for mentally ill to acquire guns.

McSally’s seat isn’t in a raging liberal district. I get that. I guess I’d be less disappointed if she actually put aside meaningless votes on defunding Planned Parenthood that are based on falsehoods. I’d be less disappointed if she took to heart the woman who once stood in her shoes and what happened on Jan. 8, and realized it would be OK to not court the love of the NRA and simply champion what’s right.

It takes more than a national memorial. Much more.

— Mari Herreras, mherreras@tucsonweekly.com

This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2017.

23 replies on “Editor’s Note”

  1. Ms. Herreras, instead of remembering innocent and heroic victims killed and wounded during Gabby’s horrible shooting you decided to defend Planned Parenthood (PP). You obviously are unaware of the irony – and of PP’s history and its long record, particularly against US Blacks. Research everything below.
    Here is a brief synopsis:
    The NAACP was founded by 21 white, socialist, atheist, Marxist Democrats and was the antithesis of Rev. Martin Luther King Sr.s community at that time, which was capitalist, Christian, very pro-life, and pro-America. So, these 21 white people began to put a message through to the black community that Democrats were good, liberalism was good, and they subscribed to the same philosophy Margaret Sanger believed of blacks at that time.

    Margaret Sanger, The Function of Sterilization, The Birth Control Review, October 1926, 299. Sanger delivered the address before the Institute of Euthenics at Vassar College on August 5, 1926. Sangers address sounds eerily familiar to the 1999 controversial Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (CRACK) program. The program offered to pay drug-addicted women $200 cash if they underwent sterilization or had long-term chemical birth control (which may actually cause abortion in the very early stages of pregnancy) inserted into their bodies. The billboard ads were placed in inner cities.
    BTW: Government “Aid to Dependent Children” (by Lyndon Johnson in 1965) has destroyed the American Black Family. Most comparisons of white and black families ignore the devastation when 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock. Read Moynihan for a complete examination of ADC, and see: http://www.census.gov/populati…

    Planned Parenthood has been busily abetting ADC by aborting 40% of black babies in our inner cities for almost a century.
    Baltimore Ravens player Ben Watson commented on Margaret Sangers Planned Parenthood’s apparent Plan. “I do know that blacks kind of represent a large portion of the abortions and I do know that honestly the whole idea with Planned Parenthood and [founder Margaret] Sanger in the past was to exterminate blacks, and its kind of ironic that its working.
    NFL Super Bowl champion Burgess Owens said, “Sanger looked at blacks as weeds.
    If you wonder why urban, young, black women are allowing themselves to be victimized by Planned Parenthood, look at BET [Black Entertainment Television], which is owned by very wealthy white Democrats”, Owens urged. Look at the 15 years of messaging that has been gotten through to our urban black communities: anti-white, anti-police, anti-family, and pro-abortion.
    “Forty percent of black babies have been given to the altar of abortion”, he observed. “In any other society, that would be considered genocide. Today, we put a nice name to it and, at the same time, have convinced our own mothers that their babies are no more than an inconvenience or a profit”.

    Eugenics was designed a century ago to rid society of the “unfit” to preserve the so-called Gene Pool. Planned Parenthood has emerged as Grand Patron of Eugenics in all its horror. Kermit Gosnell publicly and openly killed many thousands of black babies (born and unborn) over his thirty years in a North Philadelphia ghetto clinic that publicly catered to Black women, with very little Government oversight and no Medical inspection of the supposedly sanitary facility. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-23…
    Ms. Herreras, refute the above if you can, but please consider the real history of Planned Parenthood before you praise such a horror in the future and somehow connect it to a madman shooting innocent people.

  2. “It takes more than a national memorial. Much more.”

    The rescinding of the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, that document that liberals, aka, ‘progressives’, in reality communists, have so much revulsion for.

    There’s a process for that. Go ahead – give it your best shot! Especially now that the liberal agenda has been totally repudiated and you have no federal or state political power whatsoever.

  4. William Heuisler would do well to read about Margaret Sanger from the words of Black women who are aware of her ties to eugenics AND who can tell the history of the Black community who worked closely with Sanger to advocate for birth control.
    https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/fal…

    Lumping Gosnell in with PP is unbelievably dumb.

    I understand that some folks just have a difficult time with history. Facts are hard.

  5. “The rescinding of the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, that document that liberals, aka, ‘progressives’, in reality communists, have so much revulsion for.”

    Nobody is trying to rescind the Second Amendment cupcake snowflake. The commie progressive liberals will not knock on your mama’s basement door, come downstairs and take your precious guns.

    You can change your underwear now. Believe me, this threat (and all of the others) you’ve dreamed up isn’t (aren’t) real.

  6. That’s right What Again, nobody is talking about repealing the 2nd Amendment. You can relax.

    Maybe try relaxing while you read this article about the efforts to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rescind-the-second-amendment/2012/12/20/703841a2-495a-11e2-8af9-9b50cb4605a7_story.html?utm_term=.64a4df409835

    http://archive.jsonline.com/news/opinion/revoke-the-second-amendment-b99593318z1-331843711.html

    http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/repeal-the-second-amendment-6

    http://reason.com/archives/2016/05/25/hillary-clintons-second-amendment

    http://www.salina.com/opinion/letters/rescinding-second-amendment-not-tyranny/article_ebb76db7-d2b2-5ba5-800c-ca33154f90d7.html

    https://www.change.org/p/the-people-of-the-united-states-rescind-the-second-amendment

    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-second-amendment-20151003-story.html

    http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2014/05/30/rich-robinson-its-time-to-repeal-the-2nd-amendment/

    http://www.idsnews.com/article/2015/11/letter-the-u-s-should-repeal-the-second-amendment

    http://www.salon.com/2015/12/04/the_second_amendment_must_go_we_ban_lawn_darts_its_time_to_ban_guns/

    There you go What, Again. Doesn’t it make you fell much better to know that “Nobody is trying to rescind the Second Amendment,” as your friend says above?

  7. Friend? Seriously Larry? Wrong, Again is about the same amount of friend as brain cancer.

    Oh, by the way, thanks for all those useless links.

    Are you training under Wrong, Again? If so, you gotta step up your troll game.

    You actually seem like you have a sliver of intelligence. Wrong, Again doesn’t ever seem like that.

    You need to pay more attention in (low) class.

  8. Troll? What do you call what you are doing? Useless links? I don’t see any supporting your view. Why is that?

    Next time you say “nobody” you might want to check first. Now get out of your Mom’s basement and wash those pajamas. You’re starting to smell.

  9. Like I said…useless links.

    No proof of anything.

    I actually have a life outside of mama’s basement. I actually live in my own house with my own family. You and Wrong, Again are proving yourselves to be on a level…a very useless level.

    P.S.-After that stupid post, I take back the statement in which I said it seems like you have a sliver of intelligence. Sometimes even I slip up. I am human you know.

  10. How can you ignore the link from the San Jose Insider. You read it. How can you defend your comment? Or is this all you do, attempt to insult people ?

  11. Insult people?

    I’ve never insulted one person who didn’t bring it on, such as yourself.

    With the possible exception of overrated musicians, such as Bob Dylan.

  13. JJMarks, thank you for attempting to correct me – for saying Sanger did not believe in abortion. The article you referenced certainly set me straight, confirming the campaign Sanger and others who wanted to protect the Gene Pool waged for the sterilization of the unfit and the lesser breeds.
    I quote your reference:
    “The flip side of shaming wealthy white women into reproducing more quickly was figuring out a way to keep the inferior stock from breeding, so that healthy and wealthy white women could catch up and forestall the deterioration of the race. The answer to that quandary was forced sterilization on a massive nationwide scale in order to keep undesirable people from procreating.
    The principle targets of the programs included not only women of color (primarily Southern Black women, although Californias sterilization program targeted many Latina women), but also criminals, the poor, and any womenincluding white womenwho were believed to be feebleminded, with feeblemindedness often corresponding to sexual promiscuity.
    All of this is to say that concerns about population control weighed heavy on the minds of Americans in the early 20th century. Classes on eugenics were taught in colleges nationwide; eugenics was presented as scientific fact in biology textbooks; and the American Eugenics Society held Fitter Families Contests at state fairs throughout the 1920s, during which rural American families were encouraged to compete with one another to determine which family had the best human stock. Medals that read Yea, I have a goodly heritage were awarded to families that were deemed genetically favorable.
    It may seem bizarre and Orwellian to us now, but that was the United Statesin which Sanger lived. And given the enthusiasm with which ordinary Americans embraced eugenics, it is no surprise thatSanger eventually joined up with them.

  15. Thanks Larry. That’s one thing Wrong, Again can’t do. Get along with anyone regarding anything. It’s good to know that you can.

  17. Heuisler: You are obviously unable to read an article in context. The section you quoted was describing America of Sanger’s era – not Sanger. Sad!

  18. Markx,
    As you said, history is hard. Let me help you and make you proud.
    PP has its roots in Brooklyn, New York, where Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, and she changed its name to “Planned Parenthood” (PP) in 1942. History, Markx.
    And Kermit Gosnell?
    Gosnell’s trial was very informative for you history buffs. His Clinic and the PP exchanged patients over the years from about 1972. Some Gosnell patients complained to PP. PP said they would report Gosnell to Health Authorities. They (PP) never complained or reported Gosnell to Health Authorities.
    Why not?, you might ask.

    Among other historical connections between Gosnell and PP (three blocks away) over thirty years of trading patients, page 96 of the Grand Jury Report investigating Kermit Gosnell details what has come to be known as the Mothers Day Massacre.
    It was also detailed by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal:
    “It was called the Mothers Day Massacre the brainchild of Harvey Karman, an eccentric California man without medical training who had served 2 years in prison for performing illegal abortions in the 1950s. Karman teamed with a young Philadelphia doctor who offered to perform abortions on 15 impoverished women, each between four and six months pregnant, who were bused to the (Gosnell) Philadelphia clinic from Chicago on Mothers Day 1972.
    “What the women didnt know was that they were guinea pigs for a device Karman had invented, which he called the super coil. He had tested it only on wartime rape victims in Bangladesh, where he had traveled under the sponsorship of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.”
    That was the “Planned Parenthood Federation” for all you history buffs.
    And that young Philadelphia doctor, of course, was Kermit Gosnell.
    The Super Coil was a bunch of razors coated with protective gel and wrapped into a ball before being placed into the mothers uterus. After warming up in the body, the gel would melt and the razors would spring open cutting up the baby. You must be so proud, Markx.

    There’s lots more history. History experts should look this stuff up before preaching.

  20. Thank you, Mari, for vocalizing what many of us are feeling as well. The hypocrisy is stunning. McSally is the NRA darling. Voters will remember in 2018.

  21. The International Planned Parenthood Federation is not the U.S. Planned Parenthood although they share the same philosophy.

  22. Retrorv,,
    Sanger founded IPPF in 1948 – same “unfit” victims, same sterilization. Why nitpick?

  23. The cherry on the sundae. Not only did an armed citizen save a trooper’s life, the scumbag he shot was here illegally.

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