Gillibrand said the Second Amendment itself allowed for regulation of weapons. Report: Gillibrand shifts on guns

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — who is occasionally mentioned as a possible 2016 candidate and once boasted she kept rifles under her bed — has come under attack for changing views on gun control, according to a report Tuesday.

The Democratic lawmaker, who as a congresswoman had received an “A” grade from the NRA, has become a vocal advocate of tighter gun control in the wake of the mass killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School earlier this month, the New York Post noted, though she has supported other gun law-tightening measures in her Senate career.


“I think gun owners probably view her in ways they view Mitt Romney,” Richard Feldman, the head of the Independent Firearms Owners Association, told the paper. “How do you trust someone when they change their stance and politics?”

In 2009, she said she kept two guns under her bed, according to a Newsday headline from that year. “If I want to protect my family, if I want to have a weapon in the home, that should be my right,” she said in the February 2009 story. Later that year, however, she authored a measure that would facilitate crackdowns on illegal guns.

Gillibrand’s office told the Post in the Tuesday piece that “her old [upstate congressional] district ‘did not [have] the same issues of gang and gun violence’ as other parts of the state.”

In an op-ed article for the New York Daily News earlier this month, Gillibrand wrote that she was deeply shaken when “my friend, Rep. Gabby Giffords, was nearly killed at the hands of a mentally ill gunman while conducting the same type of ‘Congress at Your Corner’ event I have done dozens of times in my career.”

In that article, Gillibrand said the Second Amendment itself allowed for regulations of weapons.

“As someone who believes in the Constitution and an individual’s right to bear arms, I believe the first place we should look for answers is in the Second Amendment itself,” she wrote, adding, “The words ‘well-regulated’ prove the Founding Fathers themselves understood the need to have reasonable limits.”