Clinton slams Sanders’s ‘unimaginable’ position on guns

by Jesse Byrnes - 04/06/16 9:31 AM ET

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Wednesday ripped rival Bernie Sanders for his “unimaginable” position on guns.

Clinton pointed to the front page of Wednesday’s New York Daily News, which exclaimed “Bernie’s Sandy Hook shame,” describing it as dealing with an issue that is among her “biggest contrasts” with Sanders.

{mosads}”That he would place gun manufacturers’ rights and immunity from liability against the parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook is just unimaginable to me,” Clinton said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Sanders was asked by the Daily News’s editorial board about family of the victims in the 2012 Newtown, Conn., shooting calling for the ability to sue gun manufacturers for damages. Sanders said he didn’t think victims of a gun crime should be able to sue the manufacturer.

“In the same sense that if you’re a gun dealer and you sell me a gun and I go out and I kill [someone] … do I think that that gun dealer should be sued for selling me a legal product that he misused?” Sanders asked, shaking his head.

“But I do believe that gun manufacturers and gun dealers should be able to be sued when they should know that guns are going into the hands of wrong people.”

The daughter of a woman who died in the Newtown shooting slammed Sanders on Twitter on Tuesday night for his comments.

Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver on Tuesday sought to respond to the Daily News interview.

“What came up was about small stores in rural areas that support a hunting community,” Weaver said, referring to the hunting community in Vermont, where Sanders is the senator.

“Certainly he does not support people, companies engaged in reckless conduct that puts guns or ammunition in the hands of people who shouldn’t have it. So he is certainly in favor of making sure that anyone who is a bad actor is punished, but anyone that is not a bad actor should not be punished.”

Clinton has long gone after Sanders on the issue of guns and has criticized his past votes against bills giving the victims of gun violence the ability to sue gun manufacturers. She’s focusing on the issue again leading into New York’s April 19 primary after Sanders picked up a win Tuesday in Wisconsin.

Clinton also repeatedly dodged in her “Morning Joe” interview Wednesday when pressed by host Joe Scarborough to say whether she thought Sanders was qualified to be president. Instead she pointed to the Daily News interview and Sanders’s remarks on income inequality and breaking up big banks.

“I think the interview raised a lot of really serious questions,” Clinton said. “The core of his campaign has been ‘break up the banks,’ and it didn’t seem in reading his answers that he understood exactly how that would work.”

“What he has been saying about the core issue in his whole campaign doesn’t seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done,” she added later.

“I think he hadn’t done his homework, and he had been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions,” she said of the interview.

Tags Bernie Sanders Gun control Hillary Clinton