Clinton Jumps On ‘Daily News’ Sanders Attack With Tweet Set To Backfire

Clinton is making good on the promise to “dramatically increase its assault on Sanders” that she made on CNN, jumping on a story from the New York Daily News with a tweet — one that is primed to backfire. Not only is the story Clinton references an exaggeration, but the tweet itself is a misleading attack on a fellow Democrat.

Clinton’s presidential campaign is stalling. A string of resounding victories by the Sanders’ campaign is putting her in a dog fight that the mainstream media thought was over months ago. Desperate to win her adopted home state of New York, Clinton appeared earlier today on the MSNBC show Morning Joe and then posted a short video clip of her appearance along with a shady accusation.

.@BernieSanders prioritized gun manufacturers’ rights over the parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook.https://t.co/c1oaOJLhCz

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 6, 2016

Clinton is referencing the 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre and the 20 children who were murdered. As previously reported by the Inquisitr, the story itself is misrepresentation at best. The tweet is equally disingenuous.

In his 25 years in Congress, the Vermont senator has been a long-time proponent of sensible, stricter gun regulation — earning him a D- from NRA. Bernie has pushed for gun control, limits on gun sale loopholes that can allow weapons into the wrong hands, and restrictions/bans on assault rifles similar to the ones used by the shooter at Sandy Hook. He made his case for his record in the Daily News interview, but that section was largely ignored.

Bernie Sanders’ legislative history on the subject includes the Instant Background Checks for Gun Purchase Amendment, the Regulation of Semi-Automatic Assault Weapons, Minimum Sentences for Gun Crimes, Limits on Firearm Magazine Capacity, the Prohibition on the Sale of Assault Weapons, and the Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015.

His few votes against gun control, like the Brady Handgun Bill, were done out of the same logic as he showed in the Daily News story.

“In the same sense that if you’re a gun dealer and you sell me a gun and I go out and I kill him [gestures to someone in room]… Do I think that that gun dealer should be sued for selling me a legal product that he misused? [Shakes head no.]”

Making a manufacturer liable for the actions of their customers and the misuse of their own products — a matter outside of their control — is not reasonable. The precedent the Daily News is referring to would create the potential for ridiculous lawsuits, like suing Toyota because a drunk driver in a Camry hits another car.

In the Sandy Hook lawsuit, Sanders made sure to specify when a gun dealer would be liable for a shooting in the New York Daily News interview.

“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. So if somebody walks in and says, ‘I’d like 10,000 rounds of ammunition,’ you know, well, you might be suspicious about that. So I think there are grounds for those suits, but not if you sell me a legal product.”

The fact that Bernie Sanders stipulates the grounds for a lawsuit, similar to the Sandy Hook case, is naturally left out of Clinton’s misleading attack.

Hillary Clinton has lost her cool on the campaign trail before, although this is the first time she’s politicized a tragedy like the Sandy Hook massacre. As the Inquisitr reported before, the former secretary of state lashed out at a Greenpeace activist over campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry.

Clinton’s face turned from her typical, practiced smile into an angry grimace and she counter-accused the activist of spreading lies for Bernie Sanders.

As for Hillary Clinton’s own stance on gun control, it has veered back and forth over the years. In 2008, while running for the Democratic nomination against Barack Obama she claimed to be a “pro-gun church goer” according to the New York Times. She then also stated that the gun issue was an issue for each state to decide and opposed the inflexibility of federal law. Obama even famously referred to her as “Annie Oakley” for her apparent love of guns and gun owners.

Likewise, an investigation from the IBT showed Clinton wasn’t so tough on gun control when it came to distributing them to countries that had donated money to the Clinton Foundation.

“Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.”

Of course, this is 2016. Hillary Clinton needs an angle if she’s going to stop Bernie Sanders’ momentum, and right now the Daily News story and the media firestorm around it is his biggest weakness. But then again, her tweet has a lot of room to backfire.

In 2008, Clinton criticized Barack Obama’s comments about Americans “clinging to guns,” selling herself as a “pro-gun church-goer” and saying Obama was out of touch. Could she be putting Sanders into the position she tried to fill in 2008? Making him into a right-wing gun fanatic will be a nearly impossible sell, no matter how many shootings Clinton politicizes. Accidentally making him into an advocate for sensible regulations in the firearms industry might prove far more reasonable. For now, the story from the Daily News has Bernie Sanders in a difficult position, but after the smoke clears and people read what he actually said, Clinton might find herself regretting going too negative.

[Photo by Darren Hauck/Getty Images]