“The American people have had enough and so has Hillary Clinton”, said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, as he announced the group’s endorsement at an event with Clinton at Iowa State University in Ames.
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The move comes nearly exactly five years after Giffords, then an Arizona Democratic congresswoman, was shot in the head ago during an appearance in front of a Tucson supermarket.
Fulton also said that she agrees with President Barack Obama, who wrote in his own New York Times opinion piece last week that he would not campaign for any Democratic candidate who doesn’t back certain gun measures.
“I don’t think she has any idea what that means yet, but we’re talking about it a lot”, she said.
In the wake of a church shooting in Charleston the killed nine people, Clinton said it was time to “tackle” the issue of guns “with urgency and conviction”.
The endorsement provides Clinton with yet another data point to contrast herself with Vermont Sen.
But Clinton has been more forceful on the issue of guns since it has become a way for her to knock Sanders, whose gun record is more conservative than most Democrats. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in his endorsement speech.
They argue in their statement that the gun lobby “has had a stranglehold on Washington” for years but that Clinton could break through that gridlock.
“With so many of our children’s lives on the line or taken, we simply can’t afford to elect a Republican who refuses even to acknowledge the problem of senseless gun violence”, Fulton wrote, noting out that gun violence claims 33,000 lives annually.
On Sunday Clinton welcomed the pair’s endorsement.
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“There is only one candidate who was fighting alongside this organization when we passed the historic, lifesaving Brady Bill – Bernie Sanders actually voted against it – but there is only one candidate who fought for it – and that candidate is Hillary”, Gross said. “We owe that to Gabby and Mark”.
