Clinton: Immunity for gun makers must end

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Monday issued a call to action on guns while hammering primary rival Bernie Sanders for opposing liability for gun manufacturers.

“We cannot go on like this,” she said during a forum on gun violence in Port Washington, N.Y. “If anything else was killing 33,000 people a year, we would be mobilized.

{mosads}“I have spent too many hours listening to and meeting with families who have lost loved ones to gun violence. Let’s figure out what we’re going to do to save lives.”

Clinton said the gun lobby wields the most influence of any special interest group.

“What stands in the way is the most powerful lobby in Washington,” she said.

“If you take them all — Wall Street, the drug industry, the fossil fuel industry — none is bigger or more intimidating. What they are afraid of is that there answers we can implement.”

Clinton criticized Sanders for supporting legislation that shields gun manufacturers from liability for shootings.

“We also have to reverse the gift that was given to the gun lobby with the passage of a law that grants special immunity from the general responsibilities of showing reasonable care in making and selling products,” she said.

“This is the rule for every other business that makes every other thing and sells it in our country,” Clinton added. “It is a rule that is rooted in centuries of legal history and cases.

“You do have a duty to the general public not to be reckless, not to be irresponsible. There can be constitutionally permissible restraints [on guns].”

Clinton has repeatedly hit Sanders’s position on guns, seizing on one of the few areas where her record is firmly to his left.

She ripped Sanders’s past opposition to gun maker liability as “unimaginable” last week, citing a 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Sanders argued on April 4 that victims of gun violence should not be capable of suing manufacturers when criminals abuse their weapons.