Hillary Clinton: Assault Weapons Ban ‘Should Be Reinstated’ after Orlando Attack

Hillary Clinton called to reauthorize an assault weapons ban Monday following Sunday’s mass shooting in Orlando.

“I think we’ve got to get back to commonsense safety reform, and we can’t fall into the trap that was set up by the gun lobby that says if you can’t stop every shooting and every incident, you should not try to stop any,” Clinton told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “We did have an assault weapons ban for 10 years, and I think it should be reinstated.”

The Wall Street Journal has more:

In television interviews Monday morning, Mrs. Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, called for “common sense gun safety reform,” pointing to Florida gun laws that make it easy to purchase and carry weapons including assault rifles, large caliber rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines. The Orlando gunman had legally purchased a rifle and handgun in recent days, law-enforcement officials said. The gunman had also been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2013 and 2014 over leads that he had radical, violent leanings. “In this particular case, he was interviewed more than once because of reports of what he was saying, yet he had absolutely no trouble walking in and buying an assault weapon,” Mrs. Clinton said on ABC News. A so-called “assault-weapons ban” was in effect in from 1994 to 2004. It banned certain semiautomatic weapons, including some AR-15 models, and set a limit on high-capacity magazines.

Clinton also shifted from her past refusal to label terror as radical Islam, telling Cuomo Monday that she felt comfortable using either “radical Islamism” or “radical jihadism” to describe the threat.

“It matters what we do more than what we say,” she said. She proceeded to subtly condemn her general election opponent Donald Trump for his response to the shooting.

“What I won’t do, because I think it is dangerous for our efforts to defeat this threat, is to demonize and demagogue and declare war on an entire religion,” she said. “That plays right into ISIS’ hands.”

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