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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event in Baltimore on April 10. | AP Photo Clinton blasts Sanders' 'rural state' explanation on guns

Hillary Clinton escalated her attacks on Bernie Sanders' record on guns in New York on Monday, blasting the Vermont senator for his repeated votes against the Brady Bill in the 1990s and his vote more than a decade ago to curtail gun manufacturers' liability.

Remarking upon Sanders' frequent invocation of his rural state of Vermont in defending his past votes (though he does currently support an amendment to the liability bill in the Senate) Clinton noted that most of the guns used to commit crimes in New York come from elsewhere — many of them from neighboring Vermont.

“Most of the guns that are used in crimes and violence and killings in New York come from out of state. And the state that has the highest per capita number of those guns that end up committing crimes in New York come from Vermont," Clinton said during a gun violence panel in Port Washington, accompanied by family members of people who were killed in mass shootings in recent years.

"So this is not, 'Oh, you know, I live in a rural state, we don’t have these problems,'" she continued. "This is, you know what? It’s easy to cross borders. Criminals, domestic abusers, traffickers, people who are dangerously mentally ill — they cross borders, too. And sometimes they do it to get the guns they use. This has to become a voting issue for those of us who want to save lives.”