Hillary Clinton continued the escalation of words between her and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, blaming his state Monday for gun violence in New York.
“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,” Hillary said during a panel on gun violence held in Port Washington.
She has been recently focusing on hitting Sanders on his gun record, while he has a D- from the NRA, she views his record as not liberal enough. The Clinton campaign has used family members of victims in mass shootings to attack the Vermont senator for his opposition to allowing gun manufactures to be liable to lawsuit.
“So this is not, ‘Oh you know, I live in a rural state, we don’t have these problems,'” Clinton said. She added, “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.”
“The highest per capita number of guns that end up committing crimes in New York” is a statistic hard to pin down. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) has released raw data on the origin of guns used in crimes in New York in 2014. Vermont is far down on that list with 55 guns, New York leads it with 1,397 recovered.