ALBANY, N.Y. — Bernie Sanders is known for sticking to his guns — literally — and that might be his undoing in big, bullet-strafed states like New York.

Sanders, a paragon of political consistency who has almost never flip-flopped on a major issue, enters Tuesday’s critical primary here lagging badly behind Hillary Clinton among black voters. A significant drag on his popularity in violence-ravaged African-American neighborhoods remains his refusal to back a Democratic bill that would hold weapons manufacturers liable for gun violence. Clinton, fairly or not, is painting a solid small-state progressive as a callous gunslinger carrying the NRA’s ammo against the interests of black urbanites.


His option? Change positions. That’s what Kirsten Gillibrand, a proud, passionate turncoat on guns, urges her Senate colleague from Vermont to do for the sake of his politics and, you know, his immortal soul. New York’s junior senator, a passionate Clinton backer and feminist, broke down during an emotional sit-down here for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast when I asked her about her own conversion from an upstate House member with a 100 percent NRA rating (who once stored a shotgun under her bed) to an upper-chamber anti-gun crusader.

“I was somebody who was not as focused on this, as I should have been, as a House member. Meeting these families devastated me, broke my heart,” said Gillibrand, when I suggested she switched positions as a matter of political expediency in a deep-blue state where most Democrats favor stringent gun restrictions.

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Gillibrand, a 49-year-old mother of two young sons not prone to public expressions of emotion, began to cry in mid-sentence. “It’s so crippling — I mean, I sat down with a mother last week in Brooklyn, and she lost her 4-year-old baby … she took her kid to a park,” she said. “Every mom takes their kid to a park. And she took her kid to a park and the kid was killed, a baby, a 4-year-old. … [Sanders] doesn’t have the sensitivity he needs to the horror that is happening in these families. I just don't think he's fully getting how horrible it is for these families.”

Her reaction took me by surprise, in part because I’d covered her appointment to Clinton’s vacated Senate seat in 2009 by feckless then-Gov. David Paterson, when she was known for her conservative, Blue Dog Democratic politics. Barely 40, she also had a reputation as a young-woman-in-a-hurry — and I co-authored a story quoting an unnamed congressional colleague calling her “Tracy Flick,” the scheming high school presidential candidate from the movie “Election.”

Gillibrand embodies the changing politics of guns as well as anyone, having run for Congress in 2006 as part of class of candidates recruited by then-Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel geared at pulling the party back to the center. She won her right-of-center district on a platform that included her opposition to amnesty for undocumented immigrants, her commitment to balancing the federal budget and, above all, her vow to protect gun rights.

Her critics (some of them envious members of the state’s uniformly liberal congressional delegation) suggested her wedding with the gun control movement was of the shotgun variety.

But Gillibrand says her whipsaw transformation was genuine. Her mostly white, semi-rural district outside the state capital closely resembles Sanders’ Vermont, and Gillibrand says she’d simply never seen the impact of guns in big cities. She took her first step away from the NRA by introducing a gun-trafficking bill at the behest of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly.

Whatever her initial motivations, Gillibrand possesses the zeal of the converted and sees guns as the issue that will allow Clinton to generate the kind of enthusiasm for her candidacy — especially among women — that has thus far been missing from her candidacy. “This debate is relegated to the men. It's about hunting? It has nothing to do with hunting,” she said. “Nothing in this debate has to do with hunting, and nothing in this debate has to do with the Second Amendment rights. Nothing. … I think — I see the world in the lens of women's issues. I'm making everything a woman's issue. I want guns to be a woman's issue.”

Clinton, who has been campaigning with African-American mothers whose kids were killed in gun crimes, isn’t going quite far enough, Gillibrand says. She wants a “women’s crusade” on the issue, adding that Clinton “might not have made that connection in her own mind. I've made that connection.”

Sanders, for his part, has long backed core Democratic positions on guns — including the assault weapons ban and expanded background checks, often putting him at odds with his Second Amendment-loving constituents. Yet at last week’s testy debate in Brooklyn, Sanders refused to apologize to the families of the 2013 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, for dissing their lawsuit against gunmaker Remington and chuckled when Clinton suggested the issue was one of their most significant differences — drawing a “that’s not funny” rebuke from the former senator. “We hear a lot from Sen. Sanders about the greed and recklessness of Wall Street, and I agree,” Clinton added. “What about the greed and recklessness of the gun manufacturers and dealers in America?”

Gillibrand isn’t quite a Clinton protégé (California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, has played that role for her), but her career has been shaped, time and again, by the woman she replaced in the Senate. Back in the mid-1990s, as a young lawyer, Gillibrand seethed about not scoring an invite to Clinton’s landmark speech in Beijing, even though she had studied Mandarin at Dartmouth. By 2004, Gillibrand — whose mother was a prominent Albany-area Democratic operative — was mulling a congressional bid and reached out to Clinton for advice.

The newly elected senator was friendly, businesslike and brutal. “She had such tough questions for me,” Gillibrand recalled. “’Which district? Against who? And you're about to have a baby?’ I couldn't answer any of them.”

Heeding her idol’s counsel, Gillibrand took a pass, raised cash for Clinton’s 2006 reelection bid, attended training sessions for female candidates and, finally, commissioned a poll on her own potential race against GOP incumbent John Sweeney, a blustery conservative who called himself “Congressman Kick-Ass.” Clinton was much more encouraging this time (Sweeney would be deeply damaged by domestic violence allegations), but she coached Gillibrand to brace for the emotional impact of a defeat.

“We know what — it's like to lose elections,” the former first lady said, referring to her husband’s unsuccessful congressional bid in 1974.

Still, Gillibrand’s connection to Clinton is less about their personal relationship and more about their common bond as aggressive, ambitious female politicians competing in an enterprise still dominated by men. She had a front-row seat at the Brooklyn debate, diplomatically pronounced Sanders’ attacks on Clinton as within-bounds — but confessed to detesting the tone. “I get really upset when everything gets really very nasty — I don't love it,” she told me. “A lot of women don't like the negative. That's why a lot of women won't run for office. They don't want — they don't like negative campaigning. They don't like negative ads.”

Gillibrand’s own personal experiences with male politicians and the media have left her guarded — and determined not to trip the hidden land mines of gender politics. She is candid, in a way most female politicians aren’t, about the role her appearance has had in her career. As a young corporate lawyer, she worked on a case for a year — and at the celebration dinner one of the firm’s partners blurted out. “Let's now congratulate everyone who's worked so hard. Kirsten, thank you for your hard work, and don't you all just love her new haircut?”

Gillibrand is still mortified. “I nearly died. I was — I nearly died, because I was expecting, like, "She's worked her ass off.’”

She’s had similar experiences with men in the Senate; she says they “treat me like a granddaughter” — but proceeds to make it sound slightly creepy. “So one very senior Republican senator one time said to me, "Oh, Kirsten, I just like you so much. I just can't wait to find something we can work on together,’” she told me.

All this has left Gillibrand determined to downplay her appearance as much as possible — to the point that she eschews the normal clothes she wears at home with her kids (one of her sons insists she wear pink off-duty).

“One thing I do to minimize that is I tend not to wear interesting clothes — I just wear navy blue dresses almost every day — navy blue or black or gray,” she said — recoiling at the tabloid backlash she faced after wearing a flashy, sequined outfit to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. “You will not remember a thing I've worn in the past two years because I've purposely made sure you don't remember what I wore.”

One thing Gillibrand won’t mute is her competitiveness. She was a respectable college tennis player — and one friend told me she is fond of quoting a study linking a woman’s success in politics to athletic prowess. These days, she’s channeled her will to compete into a sport she barely understands: softball.

Gillibrand pitches on the congressional women’s team, struggles to get her pitches over the plate and knows so little about the sport I correct her when she calls a “game” a “match.” But she excels at one aspect of the enterprise: trash talk.

“Here’s how I psych them out,” she told me — then rattles off her faux-supportive spiel.

“Don't be nervous. Don't be nervous. Don't be nervous,” she tells the opposing hitter. "You can hit this. Just hit it. Here you go.”