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President Biden is hosting an event today at the White House with victims of gun violence to mark the signing of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and one the participating high-profile shooting survivors who will attend is former Arizona Congressmember Gabby Giffords, who survived a 2011 assassination attempt. As mass shootings continue to plague the United States, we speak to the directors of “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down,” a new documentary premiering this week that follows Giffords as she fights to recover from the 2011 attack, and her subsequent advocacy for gun safety legislation. Giffords was just honored last week with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her activism. The film follows “the fight that this woman has had to come back herself and then to come back as a public figure fighting to try to do something about the epidemic of gun violence in our country,” says Julie Cohen, co-director of “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down.” Former President Barack Obama, who attempted to pass gun safety legislation with Giffords’s help but failed, is featured in the documentary during a moment that qualified as “the most disappointed and the angriest he had ever been as president,” adds fellow co-director Betsy West. Cohen and West also directed “My Name Is Pauli Murray” and the Academy Award-nominated ”.”
