Patricia Maisch looks like a grandmother, but she is being hailed as a hero today for helping to stop alleged Tucson shooter Jared Loughner by wrestling away a fresh magazine of bullets as he tried to reload. 
 
 Maisch, 61, effectively disarmed the shooter as several men pounced on him and threw him to ground. As they struggled to hold him down, Maisch joined the scrum on the ground, clinging to the gunman's ankles. 
 
 Maisch and her fellow heroes -- identified as Bill Badger, Roger Sulzgeber and Joseph Zamudio -- stopped the carnage after 20 people were shot, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Six people died. 
 
 "[I] knew right away it was a gun... I heard a continuation of shots," Maisch told a news conference today. 
 
 Maisch, who has a crown of snow-white hair, was standing towards the back of the line to greet and snap a photo with Giffords at the "Congress in Your Corner" event at a Safeway grocery store. 
 
 Speaking to the press today, Maisch recalled how she stopped Loughner as he tried to reload his Glock 9 mm weapon. 
 
 "I could see him coming. [He] shot the lady next to me," Maisch said. 
 
 As he was shooting, she said, she was expecting to be hit and she wondered what it would feel like. 
 
 There was "lots of blood and confusion," she said. 
 
 She considered trying to run away, she said, but thought that would make her more of a target, so she laid down on the ground. But then something unexpected happened. 
 
 "Then he was next to me on the ground," she said. "The gentleman knocked him down. 
 
 "I kneeled over him. He was pulling a magazine [to reload] and I grabbed the magazine and secured that. I think the men got the gun, and I was able to get the magazine," she said. 
 
 Maisch said Badger and Sulzgeber both sat on the gunman while she held his ankles down. Police said that Zimudie helped by hanging on to Loughner's legs. 
 
 Sulzgeber was reportedly standing with his wife, third in line to meet with Giffords, while Zimudie was in the nearby Walgreens and came running out once he heard the shooting. 
 
 "I thought I would be shot. I am thankful for those two brave men," Maisch said. "I am not a hero. The other guys are. I just assisted getting the clip." 
 
 Badger, a 74-year-old retired army colonel living in Tucson, told Pottsville, Pa.'s Republican-Herald how he helped capture Loughner, and that he was grazed in the back of the head by a bullet. 
 
 The Heroes of the Tucson Shooting 
 
 "I heard the shots but I thought they were fireworks at first," Badger told the newspaper. "I wasn't sure they were shots until I actually saw the shooter, and I was sure he was really shooting bullets when I felt the sting on the back of my head." 
 
 According to Badger, who the Republican-Herald confirmed was treated for an injury at a hospital, he was the first person standing next to a row of chairs leading to Giffords when the first shots rang out. 
 
 Badger told the paper, "I turned and saw him running down the line of people on the chairs. He ran between me and the store. Someone hit him with a chair and he flinched a little. That's when I grabbed his left arm. Someone grabbed his right arm and we got him to the ground. 
 
 "The other guy put his knee into the back of his neck and I grabbed him around the throat. We held him until police got there. While we had him on the ground I saw blood running and it wasn't until then I realized it was coming from the back of my head," Badger said. 
 
 Speaking outside her home this evening, Maisch said that when she noticed that one of the men was bleeding from the head, she ran into the Safeway to get paper towels. 
 
 "I put a compress on the man's head while he was securing the shooter," she said. ||||| In a crisis, we say, we can't be sure how we'd react -- whether we'd run or freeze, scream or, as in a nightmare, be unable to make a sound. But four bystanders in Arizona now know that they kept Saturday's shooting rampage at a shopping center from becoming an even more catastrophic event, according to law enforcement officials.As it was, the attack killed six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 14, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who authorities say was the target of the attack.But if the gunman had been able to reload his semi-automatic pistol and keep firing, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said Sunday, "there would have been a huge, greater catastrophe."The gunman was thwarted in that effort by four unassuming people who were identified as Bill Badger, Patricia Maisch, Roger Salzgeber and Joseph Zamudio. Not one of them is willing to call himself a hero.Maisch, who looks more storybook grandmother than crime fighter, told reporters that she had not run from the scene of the attack because she feared she would be shot. But when she saw the gunman trying to reload, she made a move to grab the magazine."The two men that secured him were the heroes," Maisch, 61, told CNN. "I just was an assistant in being able to get that magazine or clip."It was the self-described "assistant," however, who created just enough of a distraction to allow two others -- Badger and Salzgeber -- to tackle the shooter. Then Zamudio, who had been inside a nearby Walgreens when the shooting started, helped hold down the assailant.Badger, 74, told WNEP television in Moosic, Pennsylvania: "I asked him when we were holding him down, 'Why in the world would you do something like this?' and he wouldn't answer. He was only 22-years-old. He looked like a young kid to me when I saw him and just why would he do something like this? There's no reason and the concern of mine was to shoot a 9-year-old girl and to shoot innocent people, something has to be wrong."Badger, a retired Army colonel, said he had just done what anyone else would have done. "Once you're in the military, you never retire," he said. "You're always there to help the community and the people who are in danger."Salzgeber was even more reticent, declining to talk to reporters who telephone him and saying the authorities had promised him his name would not be released, according to The Arizona Republic. "I'm totally stressed out about this," said Salzgeber, who was one of the top three signature collectors for Giffords petitions when she was qualifying to run for re-election in 2010. "I'm not interested in talking."Zamudio said the gunman was already on the ground when he reached him. "I laid on him and held him down, and made sure the gun was down," Zamudio said.The gunman, who authorities have identified as 22-year-old Jared Loughner, was armed with a 9-millimeter Glock semi-automatic, which FBI Director Robert Mueller said he had obtained last November. Mueller did not say where Loughner got the gun. CNN reported it was purchased at a store in Tucson.Federal prosecutors filed charges against Loughner Sunday afternoon, including one count of attempting to assassinate a member of Congress, two counts of killing an employee of the federal government and two counts of attempting to kill a federal employee. Mueller indicated that additional charges may be filed based on the continuing investigation.The criminal complaint said that investigators found a letter from Giffords in a safe at Loughner's house thanking him for attending one of her "Congress on Your Corner" meetings in 2007. The complaint added: "Also recovered in the safe was an enveloped with handwriting on the envelope stating 'I planned ahead,' and 'My assassination' and the name 'Giffords' along with what appears to be Loughner's signature." ( See a copy of the complaint here ).Dupnik, who has received wide attention for his remarks Saturday attacking the amount of "vitriol" in political rhetoric that he said may contribute to violence, repeated that view with obvious emotion on Sunday and also lashed out at laws that let "everybody" carry guns."I think that when the rhetoric about hatred, about mistrust of government, about paranoia about how government operates and to try to inflame the public on a daily basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has impact on people especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with."Asked how he felt about Arizona's gun laws, Dupnik said of the state, "I think we're the Tombstone of the United States of America.""I have never been a proponent of letting everybody in this state carry weapons under any circumstances that they want and that's almost where we are," he said. "The legislature at this time is proposing that students and teachers be allowed to have weapons in schools and in college. . . . That's the ridiculous state to where we have become."Dupnik was referring to a bill proposed by state Sen. Karen Johnson that would allow people 21 and older who have a concealed weapons permit to carry a firearm at public colleges and universities, where they are generally not allowed. She said that if a student or teacher was armed, they could act if a gunman tried to open fire on campus as had happened at Northern Illinois University in 2008 The 74-year-old Dupnik is a Democrat who, according to the Washington Post , "is known for his colorful and often bluntly partisan commentary." He has called Arizona's new law cracking down on illegal immigration "racist" and "stupid" and has refused to enforce it. He has also described Tea Party partisans as "bigots."Dupnik's Saturday remarks drew a rebuke from Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, a Republican, who said on CBS' Face the Nation, "I didn't really think that that had any part in a law enforcement briefing last night. It was speculation. And I don't think we should rush to speculate. I thought that the report that we just saw from Tucson seems to have it about right. We really don't know what motivated this young person except to know he was very mentally unstable."
– Talk about a brave 61-year-old: Patricia Maisch is being called a hero after wrenching away the Tucson shooter’s ammunition, preventing him from reloading as she helped press him to the ground, ABC News reports. Maisch was in line to meet Rep. Gabrielle Giffords when the shooting began. She threw herself to the ground to dodge the attack, and found Jared Lee Loughner “next to me on the ground” after he was laid low by another bystander. A trio of men—Bill Badger, Roger Sulzgeber, and Joseph Zimudie—had "knocked him down" and sat on him as she held his ankles. "I kneeled over him. He was pulling a magazine and I grabbed the magazine and secured that." "I think the men got the gun, and I was able to get the magazine," preventing him from reloading, Maisch said. Click for more on the four heroes.