An Arizona man who was shot but survived Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree said today that he was “outraged” that someone would try to assassinate US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Eric Fuller, 63, one of 13 people wounded Saturday afternoon, was shot in Tucson during the rampage that left six people dead.
Fuller said he’s “doing fine, physically.”
“Miraculously, feeling very lucky,” he told “The Early Show” on CBS. “I’m outraged that someone like Gabrielle Giffords was attacked.”
Fuller, a military veteran and avid tennis player, said he is is a strong supporter of Giffords.
Fuller said he cut a tennis game short so he could hear Giffords speak, only to be shot in the leg and hit in the back with bullet fragments.
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He said he ultimately drove himself to a hospital and was released on Monday.
Fuller said the shooting was “like a bad crime drama, with a gun being pointed towards me, and a very, seemed like athletic young man pumping rounds off at everybody, and taking aim at us.”
He added, “I felt the round enter my knee. I didn’t know about the fragment in my back. I was incredulous. It was a dream-like sequence, a bad dream-like sequence. I hadn’t ever had any kind of trauma experience at that level before. And I didn’t know, I didn’t quite know, how to react.”
Fuller said he saw Patricia Maisch knock the clip out of Loughner’s hand.
“I think that was probably going to be intended as, I sensed, that that was going to be the end of me,” Fuller said. “I would like to thank her on behalf of veterans such as myself, for standing up for veterans, and for supporting bills that were supportive of veterans, and I would want her to return to her job and continue to be effective in her role as — as defending the public interest.”
Meanwhile, a majority of Americans reject the view that heated political rhetoric was a factor in the weekend shootings in Arizona, CBS News reported in a poll released today.
Since the Saturday incident in which Giffords was shot at point-blank range, various politicians and commentators have said a climate in which strong language and ideological polarization is common may have contributed to the attack.
Some of the analysts cited anti-government statements from Loughner as support for that view.
But CBS said its nationwide telephone poll found that, “57 percent of respondents said the harsh political tone had nothing to do with the shooting, compared to 32 percent who felt it did.”
Rejection of a link was strongest among Republicans, 69 percent of whom felt harsh rhetoric was not related to the attack, while 19 percent thought it played a part.
Among Democrats 49 percent placed no blame on the heated political tone against 42 percent who did. Among independents the split was 56 percent to 33 percent.
CBS said its poll of 673 adults had a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points. The poll was conducted Jan. 9-10.
With Reuters