One day after Barack Obama pledged not to support any candidate who did not favor “commonsense gun reform”, Hillary Clinton issued some of her sharpest criticism of rival Bernie Sanders to date as “wrong on gun safety”.

With gun control taking on a prominent role in the Democratic primary, Clinton on Friday rebuked Sanders’ record on the issue while casting him as an occasional ally of the National Rifle Association.

“When it really mattered, Senator Sanders voted with the gun lobby, and I voted against the gun lobby,” Clinton said in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, citing Sanders’ support in 2005 for a bill that granted legal protections to gun manufacturers.

“This is a significant difference and it’s important that, you know, maybe it’s time for Senator Sanders to stand up and say, ‘I got this one wrong’.”

While Sanders has said he would be open to revisiting the legislation, which Clinton has drawn attention to in the Democratic presidential debates, she said his response thus far was insufficient. If Sanders truly intended to reverse course, she argued, he could introduce a bill immediately in the US Senate to repeal the legal immunity for gun makers.

“I’ve raised this issue before, standing next to Senator Sanders. He’s refused to give a straight answer,” Clinton said. “I hope he will join me and the president in supporting real change.”

The Sanders campaign pushed back against Clinton’s criticism by pointing to the senator’s support for a wide range of gun reforms, such as an assault weapons ban, universal background checks and closing the gun show loophole.



“Bernie has been a consistent supporter of gun safety legislation since he lost his first bid for Congress in a campaign in which he supported an assault weapons ban,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, said in a statement. “The National Rifle Association has given him grades of D- and F.”

Weaver went on to note that in Clinton’s 2008 bid for president, her campaign distributed mailers attacking Obama as being too strong on gun control.



“Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has a record of flip-flops on – among other issues – gun safety,” he said. “Today she’s attacking Bernie on guns. Eight years ago she attacked Barack Obama on guns.”

With just 24 days remaining until the Iowa caucuses, Clinton and Sanders have increasingly emphasized points of contrast in their platforms. And while Sanders has spent months attacking Clinton from the left on Wall Street reform, trade and environmental policy, her campaign has aggressively positioned itself as holding a decidedly more progressive record on gun control.

On Friday, Clinton invoked other votes from Sanders’ past to make the case that he had faltered in his judgment of gun violence and its impact on America.

Among them was his support for an amendment in 1993 that would have allowed a background check to automatically go through if it was not completed within one business day, a rule that was later modified to three days. The rule has since been dubbed the “Charleston loophole”.

Clinton also pointed to a vote Sanders cast in favor of allowing guns on Amtrak trains, dubbing it “a pattern”.

“I think Senator Sanders has been wrong on gun safety and that he’s wrong on the fact that this is the leading cause of death for young people in our country, particularly young African-American men,” Clinton said. “So it represents a very clear choice in a Democratic primary.”

Clinton’s comments followed a week in which gun control dominated the national discourse after the Obama administration took long-awaited executive action to expand background checks for gun sales. The president and Democrats kicked off a campaign calling on grassroots supporters to hold accountable lawmakers and candidates who refused to acknowledge the need for tighter restrictions on firearms.

In a New York Times opinion piece on Thursday, Obama went a step further by vowing not to “campaign for, vote for or support any candidate, even in my own party, who does not support commonsense gun reform”.

Clinton used the moment to distinguish her record from that of Sanders, while referring to Obama’s article as “a powerful statement about the urgent need to end the epidemic of gun violence in our country” with which she was in full agreement.

On the issue of shielding gun manufacturers from litigation, Weaver reiterated Sanders’ view that Congress “should re-examine a law”.

Sanders has defended his record as shaped by his perspective as a senator from Vermont, a rural state with low rates of gun violence. In an interview with the Guardian in December, Sanders said his gun control stance was “not very different from what Hillary Clinton or anybody else believes”.

“But politics being what it is, they saw that as a vulnerability of mine because I come from a state that doesn’t have any gun control but I think we’re handling it fine now,” he said.