Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that calling for stricter gun control laws does not diminish the fight against “domestic and international” terrorism, saying that firearms allowed an attack last week in California and earlier assaults in Colorado and Oregon to be as deadly as they were.

“What happened in San Bernardino was a terrorist attack, nobody is arguing with that,” Mrs. Clinton said on ABC’s “This Week.” “But let’s not forget, though, a week before we had an American assault on Planned Parenthood and some weeks before that we had an assault at a community college. So I don’t see these two as in anyway contradictory.”

“We have to up our game against terrorists abroad and at home, and we have to take account of the fact that our gun laws and the easy access to those guns by people who shouldn’t get them,” she said. “Mentally ill people, fugitives, felons and the Congress continuing to refuse to prohibit people on the no-fly list from getting guns, which include a lot of domestic and international terrorists — these are two parts of the same approach that I’m taking to make us safe.”

Since Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in which 14 people were killed and 21 wounded, many Democrats have called for tougher gun control measures to prevent would-be attackers from using firearms. In that same vein, President Obama on Saturday urged Congress to close legal loopholes to place persons on the “no fly” and terrorism watch lists on a national “no gun” list.

Mrs. Clinton on Sunday criticized Republicans and pro-gun advocates who have expressed opposition to such a measure as an infringement on civil liberties and a waste of resources, citing the already stringent restrictions on firearms in California and France, where terrorists killed 130 people last month. She suggested sanctions against gun sellers whose firearms are used in crimes.

“The NRA’s position always is that if you can’t stop everything, why try to stop anything,” Mrs. Clinton said, referring to the National Rifle Association. “That’s not the way law works. People are still going to drive drunk, but we still have laws. We need to end the liability for gun sellers.”

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio on Sunday criticized the accuracy of the no-fly list, saying that many people have been wrongly placed on it and using it to create a “no gun” list would further infringe on their Second Amendment rights.

“If these were perfect lists, that would be one thing,” Mr. Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But there are over 700,000 Americans on some watch list or another that would all be captured under this amendment the Democrats offered … There aren’t 700,000 terrorists operating in America openly on watch lists. They include vast numbers of Americans who have names similar to someone we’re looking for.”

The Florida senator said that when the federal government reviewed its watch lists over the past 10 years, it found no evidence that any of the 2,000 people on the lists who had bought firearms had committed a crime with a gun.

Mrs. Clinton said such arguments are “like proving the negative.”

“I took the shuttle from New York,” the former secretary of state said. “I’m a lot happier having a list that keeps people off planes if there’s any question about their intent or their potential behavior. I can’t take anybody seriously who’s going to begin to chip away at the no-fly list.”

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