CONCRETELOOP.COM

President Barack Obama led the tribute service at the McKale Memorial Center in Tucson, Arizona, on Wednesday (January 12).

The event, dubbed ‘Together We Thrive: Tucson and America’, honored the six people who were killed and the 14 wounded in the assassination attempt on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who is currently fighting for her life in hospital.

First Lady Michelle Obama sat next to Giffords’ husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, throughout the ceremony, and the President sat next to Daniel Hernandez, an intern in Giffords’ office who ran to the congresswoman’s side right after she was shot.

On Saturday morning, Gabby, her staff and many of her constituents gathered outside a supermarket to exercise their right to peaceful assembly and free speech. They were fulfilling a central tenet of the democracy envisioned by our founders –- representatives of the people answering questions to their constituents, so as to carry their concerns back to our nation’s capital. Gabby called it “Congress on Your Corner” -– just an updated version of government of and by and for the people.

And that quintessentially American scene, that was the scene that was shattered by a gunman’s bullets. And the six people who lost their lives on Saturday –- they, too, represented what is best in us, what is best in America.

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Names of the six people killed: 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, Dorothy Morris, U.S. District Judge John Roll, Phyllis Schneck, Dorwin Stoddard, and Gabe Zimmerman.