‘I appreciate the work that the NRA does to protect gun owners rights and I look forward to working with you for many years in Congress…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Second-Amendment advocates are calling out the hypocrisy of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, after a 2008 letter resurfaced undermining her recent attacks on the National Rifle Association.
Gillibrand is as notorious for her flip–flops on significant policy issues as former Vice President Joe Biden is for his friskiness or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for her cultural appropriation.
In fact, her turn to the Left has been so hard that Gillibrand even declared her own positions only a decade ago were “racist” on issues such as opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants.
So it comes as no surprise that her extreme rhetoric on gun control during Sunday’s Fox News town hall event belied a past history to which most Tea Party patriots would have given a 21-gun salute.
Gillibrand unloaded on the NRA at the town hall, calling it the “worst organization in this country” and scapegoating it for the country’s epidemic of violence.
She claimed that the U.S. was being “ripped apart again and again [because the NRA cares] more about profits than the American people.”
In response, the NRA published a fawning letter Gillibrand wrote to then-Executive Director Chris Cox in September 2008, while she was still a member of the House of Representatives. (She would replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate that year when the latter was appointed secretary of State.)
Representing the 20th congressional district—a gerrymandered stretch of the state’s eastern border that wrapped around Albany and regularly alternated between blue and red—Gillibrand appeared to embrace every gun-rights position imaginable—and then some.
“I want to be very clear that I always have and always will believe that the correct interpretation of the 2nd amendment is that it applies to an individual’s right to carry guns,” she said.
Gillibrand closed the letter by saying, “I appreciate the work that the NRA does to protect gun owners rights and I look forward to working with you for many years in Congress.”
Gillibrand’s about-face led Fox News’s Brit Hume to quip that Gillibrand was one of “the most flexible politicians” he’s ever seen.