Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., bragged Wednesday about his flunking grade from the National Rifle Association, and said he wears the pro-Second Amendment group’s low marks as a badge of honor.
The NRA’s official Twitter account noted Tuesday evening during the vice presidential debate that they had awarded Kaine an “F” rating for “his tenure at both the state and federal levels.”
On Wednesday, the Virginia senator’s account responded with, “And proud of it.”
And proud of it. https://t.co/eTkYtcuAw4
— Tim Kaine (@timkaine) October 5, 2016
The issue of gun control was mentioned only briefly Tuesday evening during the VP debate, which was held at Longwood University in Farmville, Va.
Kaine, a gun-owner, said he is, “a strong Second Amendment supporter.”
“But I’ve got a lot of scar tissue, because when I was governor of Virginia, there was a horrible shooting at Virginia Tech,” Kaine said in reference to a 2007 mass shooting event that claimed the lives of 32 people.
He continued, stressing that more needs to be done to make it harder for the wrong people to get their hands on firearms.
“We can support the Second Amendment and do things like background record checks and make us safer, and that will make police safer, too,” Kaine said.
Kaine and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton have made gun control one of the focuses of their campaign.
Clinton said last week during the first presidential debate, which was held at Hofstra University in New York, that stricter 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,” Clinton said. “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 added. “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.”
Earlier, Clinton said in an interview that gun violence poses is as serious a problem to Americans as terrorism.
“[I]t’s not only terrorists we need to be worried about,” the Democratic nominee 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.
“But I’m looking at violence broadly,” Clinton said. “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.
“[W]e’ve got too many military-style weapons on the streets in a lot of places. Our police are outgunned,” she said at the first presidential debate.
