Hillary Clinton said Monday that increased gun control measures could go a long way toward healing race relations.
“[W]e’ve got to get guns out of the hands of people who should not have them,” the Democratic nominee said during the first presidential debate hosted by Hofstra University in New York. “The gun epidemic is the leading cause of death of young African-American men, more than the next nine causes put together.”
“So we have to do two things,” she said, adding there are a few things that can be done immediately to encourage better race relations. “We have to restore trust, we have to work with the police, we have to make sure they respect the communities and the communities respect them and we have to tackle the plague of gun violence, which is a big contributor to a lot of the problems that we’re seeing today.”
Clinton, who faced off Monday against GOP nominee Donald Trump, has embraced calls for more restrictive gun laws, and has made gun control one of the focuses of her campaign. She also said in a recent interview that Americans should be just as worried about gun violence as they are terrorism.
“[I]t’s not only terrorists we need to be worried about,” Clinton said in an interview published last week by AARP.
She said in that same interview that she is determined to defeat not just terrorism, but also the broad issue of violence, including gun violence.
Clinton’s interviewer asked, “What would you do to address terrorism?”
“Well, these are legitimate fears. I believe that people are rightly concerned about violence. Terrorism is part of that violence, and we have to do the best job we can to keep America safe,” Clinton responded.
The presidential candidate continued, pointing to her plan to go hard after terrorist groups like the Islamic State with traditional and modern warfare tactics.
“But I’m looking at violence broadly,” Clinton added. “It’s also why I’ve advocated gun-safety reform, like comprehensive background checks, closing the gun-show loophole, closing the online loophole — because, you know, it’s not only terrorists we need to be worried about.
“Terrorism is part of it, but gun violence kills 33,000 Americans a year … We’ve got to get serious about stemming violence and terrorism in every way we can,” she said.
Clinton has also vowed to go after the so-called gun lobby, saying repeatedly that she will break their influence in Washington, D.C.
On Monday, the Democratic nominee laid out some of the specific steps that she would take to reduce gun violence.
“And this is something Donald has supported, along with the gun lobby, right now, we’ve got too many military-style weapons on the streets in a lot of places. Our police are outgunned,” she said.
“We have comprehensive background checks, and we need to keep guns out of the hands of those who will do harm, and we finally need to pass a prohibition on anyone who’s on the terrorist watch list from being able to buy a gun,” she added. “If you’re too dangerous to fly, you are too dangerous to buy a gun. So there are things that we can do, and we ought to do it in a bipartisan way.”
