Their bill would repeal a decade-old law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which severely restricts the civil liability of gun makers, distributors and dealers — a law that has become a flash point in the Democratic presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

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The legislation has virtually no chance of passage in a Republican-controlled Congress, but Wednesday’s event served to highlight a 2005 vote that has emerged as a major point of distinction between Clinton and Sanders, fueling a fusillade of the former’s attacks on the latter’s gun record.

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Both Clinton and Sanders were in the Senate at the time Congress passed PLCAA, which bars most civil lawsuits against gun manufacturers and dealers seeking to hold them responsible for negligence after the products they have sold are misused.

In one well-publicized case, the family of an Illinois 11-year-old who was shot by a playmate attempted to sue Beretta for failing to prevent the handgun involved from being fired without a magazine, but the lawsuit was barred under PLCAA. Lawyers representing the victims of mass shootings say the law has frustrated their efforts to press for new safety measures in the gun industry.

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Sanders supported the bill, and Clinton opposed it, giving her a rare instance where her record is clearly more liberal than Sanders’s on a central issue to Democratic voters.

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The four lawmakers who attended Wednesday’s event — Blumenthal, Schiff, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) — all have endorsed Clinton in the presidential race. Also speaking to reporters was Dan Gross, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, whose political arm has savaged Sanders’s gun record in recent weeks.

None, however, mentioned Sanders’s name during the hour-long news conference. Both Schiff and Blumenthal declined to comment on the timing of the event less than a week before the Iowa caucuses, though Schiff noted he had introduced a similar bill in the previous Congress.

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“I’m not prescient enough to know what the course of [the] presidential race would look like this session,” he said, adding: “I think it was a tragedy that this bill was passed in the first place. We are trying to end the harm done by this, but the harm has already been done.”

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Sanders has defended his 2005 vote, and his gun record in general, by noting his concerns about the rights of his mostly rural constituents.

“If somebody has a gun, and it falls into the hands of a murderer, and that murderer kills somebody with the gun, do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible? Not anymore than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beat somebody over the head with a hammer,” he told CNN in July. “That is not what a lawsuit should be about.”

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That is similar to arguments leveled by the gun industry: “Suing law-abiding firearms manufacturers for the criminal misuse by third parties of firearms that were lawfully sold amounts to suing Ford for drunk-driving accidents,” said Lawrence G. Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, to The Washington Post in 2013.

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But fact-checkers, including at The Washington Post, noted that Sanders’s vote helped grant the gun industry protections that go above and beyond those enjoyed by manufacturers of tools or most other consumer products.

Sanders has recently backed off his previous support for the liability shield, announcing earlier this month that he would support the Schiff-Blumenthal bill, albeit with some additional protections for “mom and pop hunting stores” in rural areas.