1 survivor blames Giffords for shooting
Man says wife may have lived if meet-and-greet event had security
He has been an outlier among the survivors of the 2011 Tucson mass shooting whose primary target was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He’s the only victim to blame the then-congresswoman for the incident that killed his wife.
The passing years have done nothing to soften the views of George Morris, who suffered gunshot wounds to his back and leg while trying to shield his wife, Dorothy Morris, who died from a bullet that entered her heart.
Morris told attendees of a 2019 convention that the person he blamed for the shooting that killed his wife and five other people was Giffords, faulting her for not having security at her informal meet-and-greet outside the Safeway grocery store.
“Had there been security,” Morris told attendees of the Freedom Fest convention, “my wife may not have been dead and I may not be here (at the convention).”
Morris also said at that convention that he did not fault the gunman, Jared Loughner, who was sentenced to multiple life sentences for the Jan. 8, 2011, shooting. Morris expressed sympathy for Loughner’s mental health issues.
Morris’s views go against the grain of other survivors of the shooting and those who lost loved ones.
Several survivors have banded together to argue for government action on the proliferation of high-powered and high-capacity weaponry. Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in November, have started an organization that has as one of its aims electing candidates that support gun control measures.
No one from the Giffords organization returned a request for comment on Thursday.
Harsh rhetoric before the shooting
Symbols representing Dorothy Morris’s life have been included in the January 8 memorial to be unveiled in a virtual ceremony on Friday in Tucson. But, though he has been told of the design, George Morris has not expressed approval of the memorial, said Ron Barber, the president of Tucson’s January 8 Foundation.
Barber was chief of staff to Giffords when the shooting occurred and suffered gunshot wounds to his thigh and face. He later served one term in Giffords’ seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Barber said Morris, after being initially involved with plans for the memorial, cut off communication. The foundation sent the final memorial designs to a victim advocate to pass along to Morris, but Barber said he never heard Morris’s reaction.
Without George Morris’s input, Barber said, the artists chose the symbols to represent her life by culling what they could from newspaper articles and other records.
Barber said that in the months leading up to the shooting, Giffords had been feeling the anger of the Tea Party movement, which Morris identified with. The windows of the Tucson office were shot out, Barber said, and caravans of vehicles would circle the office and honk.
There’s no evidence, Barber said, that the gunman was politically motivated. His was a separate issue involving mental illness, not harsh political rhetoric.
After his time in Congress, Barber would briefly run an organization aimed at fostering civility in public discourse.
“The Tea Party really created an environment in which a lot of harsh rhetoric became the norm,” Barber said. And the tone has not abated with the presidency of Donald Trump, as Barber said became evident with the storming of the U.S. Capitol Wednesday as Congress tallied the states’ electoral votes.
“It was building and building,” he said, “and now it was being aided and abetted by the President of the United States.”
Ready to question Giffords
Morris, reached by phone this week, refused to give an interview to The Arizona Republic.
In earlier interviews, one a month after the shooting and another 10 months later, Morris blamed Giffords and Kelly for not adequately protecting constituents at the Congress On Your Corner event.
“Every time I see them on TV,” he said of the couple in December 2011, “it makes me want to vomit.”
While recovering in the hospital, the self-described “ultraconservative” said he refused to meet with President Barack Obama, who had flown to Tucson to comfort survivors and speak at a gathering aimed to help the Tucson area emotionally heal.
“I will not kowtow to anyone,” Morris said of the refusal to meet with Obama.
Dorothy Morris was not political and often worried that her husband would offend neighbors and friends with his talk of liberal politicians sending the country down the tubes, George Morris said.
Morris met his wife in high school and the two were married for 54 years.
Morris served as a U.S. Marine and then worked as an airline pilot. The couple lived in Reno, but later settled in a retirement community in Oro Valley, just north of the Tucson city limits.
Morris said in the December 2011 interview that he was a Democrat until he retired and had time to read about politics and what was happening to the country. He became a member of the Tea Party and intended, on that January 2011 morning, to sharply question Giffords on how she could purport to be a moderate while she supported House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Obama’s signature healthcare reform act.
He didn’t get the chance.
When he heard the shots, Morris grabbed his wife, turned her around and took her to the ground, hoping to shield her with his own body. By then, she had already been shot twice, once in the lungs and once through the heart.
Morris didn’t feel the bullets that struck him but he saw blood pumping out of his legs.
As he was being carried away by paramedics, Morris said he saw his wife’s hand close. Looking back, he said that was probably when she died.
‘I thought there would be security’
Morris repeated his sentiments about the shooting at the 2019 Freedom Fest conference held at the Paris Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
The Republic reviewed video of the seminar available from organizers of the conference, described as a gathering for Libertarian-minded people.
The conceit of the panel was that gun violence was being put on trial. Intellectuals debated the issue before a jury. One side argued for modest gun control reforms; the other argued that more regulations would little or detrimental effect.
Morris served as a witness for the side arguing against more gun control, using his experience at the Tucson-area Safeway as an example.
“If I’d have been carrying there wouldn’t have been as many deaths,” Morris said. “If others were carrying, there wouldn’t have been as many deaths.”
Morris said he wasn’t carrying a weapon because he thought the event would be adequately secured.
“I thought there would be security, as most of you would expect,” he said. “But our congresswoman put all her constituents’ lives at risk.”
Morris said he didn’t hold any ill will toward the gunman.
“The man that shot me and killed my wife, I don’t hold malice against him,” Morris said. “He was off his meds.”
Morris had told The Republic in 2011 that was going to move out of his Oro Valley home. Public records show he had since bought a home in Scottsdale.