Hillary Clinton, in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, said on Monday that Republicans are "captured by the NRA" and they are "complicit" in violent crime.
The two-time presidential candidate spoke on the Center for American Progress’ "Thinking Cap" podcast, where she spoke about the Las Vegas shooting and advocated for "broad-based social change" toward gun control, Mediaite reported. Clinton argued gun deregulation is the result of the NRA's lobbying power over the Republican Party.
"The way the Republican Party has been captured by the NRA, which has intimidated a lot of Democrats ... is one of the worst developments of the last 25 years," she said.
When asked by "Thinking Cap" host Igor Volsky if Republicans were complicit in–what he described as–America’s "gun epidemic," Clinton answered emphatically in the affirmative.
"Of course they are!" she said. "Of course they are. The Brady Bill actually kept two million guns out of the hands of people who weren’t supposed to have them. If we had gone forward with the background check capacity that we should have had, and that it was up to date — my gosh, we computerize everything, and we can’t computerize that?"
She then said Charleston church killer Dylan Roof should have been stopped from buying a gun, but "the system is deliberately kept all creaky and slow."
"This is beyond absurd. This is evil," she said. "This is nothing but pure, unadulterated, greed motivated by people who want to sell as many guns as they can, to engage in a falsity of fear and rhetoric about why everybody has to have guns. And the evidence is just so clear that more guns do not make you safer."
She touted how her husband Bill Clinton passed gun regulations in the 1990’s, but said the popular backlash contributed to Democrats’ subsequent electoral defeats. Despite this, she said Americans actually support gun control and Democrats just need to do a better job of explaining their positions.
"Ninety percent of Americans agree with us, and a very overwhelming supermajority of gun owners agree with us," she said. It is unclear from what polls or studies Clinton obtained the referenced numbers.
She went on to argue that there are simply "too many guns" in the United States.
"What we saw happen in Las Vegas is another horrible example of people with too many guns and too few restraints," she said.
The issue of "too many guns," she argued, justifies a gun registry.
"We should have a gun registration program. We should have a limitation on the maximum size and ammunition capacity for guns," Clinton said. "Assault weapons should be off the streets, as they were for ten years because of the legislation passed in ‘93 to’94. There’s a lot of things I’d like to see done."
Clinton said laws should be changed to make gun makers liable for crimes committed.
"When people are being killed and gun makers and owners are being given a free pass, there is something so fundamentally wrong with our political system. I talked about it a lot: the NRA spent more money against me than they’ve ever spent against anybody running for president," she said. The former presidential candidate called that fact "a badge of courage."
Clinton also argued on Twitter Monday that the NRA was wrong to support legalization of silencers in the SHARE Act, which she said would have made the Las Vegas shooting worse. She failed to point out, however, that silencers do not make long guns quiet, but only reduce their volume to that of other types of guns, or to put another way, that of a jackhammer, according to the Washington Post.