This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A day after the National Rifle Association endorsed Donald Trump for president, the group’s chief lobbyist said “Bernie’s right” when it comes to lawsuits against gunmakers.



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For months, Hillary Clinton has slammed her opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, for supporting a 2005 federal law that bars lawsuits against gun companies when their products are misused by criminals.

On Saturday, at the annual meeting of NRA members in Louisville, Kentucky, the NRA’s chief lobbyist played a clip of a response from the Vermont senator.

During a March debate in Michigan, Sanders said: “If you go to a gun store and you legally purchase a gun, and then, three days later, if you go out and start killing people, is the point of this lawsuit to hold the gun shop owner or the manufacturer of that gun liable?

“If they are selling a product to a person who buys it legally, what you’re really talking about is ending gun manufacturing in America. I don’t agree with that.”

A hall full of NRA members gave the clip a smattering of applause. To laughter, Chris Cox, head of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said: “I don’t say this often … OK, fine, I’ve never said it. But Bernie’s right.

“Holding gun manufacturers liable for the acts of madmen and terrorists will put them out of business overnight.”

Cox said Clinton’s support of lawsuits against gun companies was a “backdoor” attempt to ban guns by “suing gun manufacturers into bankruptcy”.

Earlier this year, Sanders suggested that a lawsuit against the companies that sold a gun used in the 2012 Newtown school shooting was “a backdoor way” to ban assault weapons.

Family members of the 20 children and six adults who died at Sandy Hook elementary school are suing the manufacturer, distributor and dealer of the military-style Bushmaster rifle that was used. Lawyers for the families argue the companies were negligent in selling a dangerous weapon to the general public, and that macho advertising may be designed to target insecure, powerless young men.

The gun companies in the suit say that they are protected by the 2005 federal shield law that Sanders supported, and that the Sandy Hook tragedy had nothing to do with the type of weapon used, which was legally purchased by the gunman’s mother.

The Clinton campaign has highlighted the case, and she has won endorsement from some family members of victims from Sandy Hook victims and other mass shootings.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Cox: ‘Bernie’s right.’ Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP

The Sandy Hook families have won a series of small technical victories in recent months, with a Connecticut judge ruling in early May that gun companies should begin the discovery process. Whether the case can move forward despite the federal shield law will be decided in October.

Sanders backed off from his support of the 2005 shield law earlier this year, with his campaign saying he would now support a repeal. But as Clinton and some family members of Sandy Hook victims have criticized his stance on the gun industry, he has repeated his support for the central tenet of the law: that gun companies should not be held responsible if they sell a gun lawfully and it is later used in a crime.

Cox told NRA members that Clinton’s support for lawsuits against gun companies had nothing to do with safety “and everything to do with banning your guns”.

“When a criminal knocks out a convenience store clerk with a baseball bat, you don’t sue Louisville Slugger,” he said.

“When a terrorist shoots dozens of people in San Bernardino, or a deranged monster slaughters school children, well – according to Hillary, that’s the gun manufacturer’s fault and they ought to be sued for it. This has absolutely nothing to do with keeping anyone safer, anywhere, and everything to do with banning your guns.



“They want to create an illusion that they’re keeping us safe.”

The Obama administration should simply “take every felon with a gun, drug dealer with a gun and criminal gang member with a gun off the streets right this minute and lock them up for five years or more”, Cox said.

Instead, he said, Obama “sits back and does nothing so he can exploit the carnage”.

After the March debate, in a tweet that Clinton supporters shared gleefully, the NRA expressed its support for Sanders’ claim that lawsuits would bankrupt the gun industry.

In response to criticism, Sanders’ campaign has repeatedly touted the candidate’s “well-deserved D-minus rating from the NRA”.

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On Friday, as he accepted the NRA’s endorsement, Trump encouraged Sanders to run as an independent if he lost the Democratic nomination to Clinton.

“I think Bernie should run as an independent,” Trump said. “I want him to run as an independent. Then it would be the three of us on stage. I would love that.”

“Bernie Sanders is a good man,” Arnald Harrison, 51, an NRA member from Schererville, Indiana, said on Sunday. “It’s too bad that he’s a liberal.”

In a speech to members on Saturday, the NRA’s executive vice-president echoed a different strain of Sanders’ criticisms of Clinton – her “six-figure speeches” to Goldman Sachs.

Wayne LaPierre said: “When the political elites paved our way for Wall Street get-rich schemes and crashed our economy and there’s nowhere for you to work [and] there’s no money for police and the schools in our country are a disaster, they tell you: you’re on your own.”