Arizona Senate Senate candidate shot mother, speaks on gun control
PHOENIX (AP) — A Republican Arizona state Senate candidate has shocked gun control advocates by sharing details about shooting and killing his mother in apparent self-defense more than 50 years ago.
Bobby Wilson, who is running to represent a southern Arizona district, told The Associated Press that he’s not trying to hide anything. He says his mother was “insane” and shot at him with a rifle when he was in bed in their Oklahoma farmhouse one night in 1963. He then shot and killed her — Wilson’s sister also died that night, and the house caught on fire.
“I’m lucky to be alive, twice over,” Wilson said.
Wilson wrote about these events in his 2010 book “Bobby’s Trials” and also mentions them on his website biography. But they caught public interest when he appeared at a Moms Demand Action forum in Tucson earlier this month. Wilson told the crowd he was “living proof” that the only one who can stop someone trying to harm somebody is a “good guy with a gun.”
He didn’t say at that event that the person he shot was his mother.
Rep. Daniel Hernandez, a Democrat who represents the same district Wilson is running in, was at the forum. He said Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman who was shot in Tucson in 2011, and other gun violence survivors were in the audience. Many were shocked, he said.
Hernandez — who was at the scene when Giffords was shot — said Wilson also brought up the Giffords shooting, saying that she should’ve had security.
“I’ve never ever heard someone be so aggressive in that view, and also to drag Gabby into it, I thought, was so distasteful and so disgusting,” he said.
Jacob Martinez, an organizer with March for Our Lives AZ, said he thinks Wilson’s experiences as reported show the necessity of providing emotional help to those who need it — and ensuring that guns in homes are locked up.
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