After the mass shooting at a movie theater in Colorado, Senator Bernie Sanders said that gun control was a matter best left resolved in state capitals.

In the aftermath of the massacre at an elementary school in Connecticut, Mr. Sanders voiced support for new gun control measures, but also noted that the rights of law-abiding gun owners “must be protected.”

In fact, Mr. Sanders sounded downright skeptical of the push for tighter new laws.

“If you passed the strongest gun control legislation tomorrow, I don’t think it will have a profound effect on the tragedies we have seen,” he told Seven Days, an alternative weekly in Vermont.

Mr. Sanders’s statements on gun control, while less forceful than those of some other Democrats, did not seem out of place for a senator from a state where hunting is prevalent.