Uppity Liberals

[MADem]

18. Ah, that old canard! They preferred him to his first opponent!

Someone who agrees with most of the NRA's provisions is, as you call 'em, "a gun humper." The NRA is a nutty, all-or-nothing, with-us-or-agin-us, outfit. People who are with 'em ninty percent get an F.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-exception-bernie-sanders-liberalism

In fairness to Sanders, the senator does not always see eye to eye with the far-right gun group, but over the course of his congressional career, the Vermont independent has generally sided with the NRA on most of the major legislative fights regarding gun policy.

And he's barely passing with the paranoid nuts at the NRA--but he doesn't have an F:
http://tinyurl.com/okmfs7d

Although the NRA was thus willing to fund a campaign against one of Sanders’ opponents (who supported an assault weapons ban) in a 1990 congressional race, it has subsequently fluctuated in grading him; he reached his peak in 2006 when they gave him a C-, but after his support for President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful proposed gun control law in 2013, Sanders now sits at a D-minus.

Sanders, the legend goes, came to Congress because of the National Rifle Association. It’s not quite as simple as that — Vermonters remember Republican Peter Smith, who lost in the 1990 rematch after beating Sanders in 1988, as an awkward candidate poorly-suited for politics.

But after Smith came out in support of an assault-weapons ban after opposing it in his successful 1988 campaign against Sanders, the NRA invested heavily in defeating him — an opposition campaign that likened Smith to Pinocchio for his flip-flop and featured bumper stickers: “Smith and Wesson — Yes, Smith in Congress — No.”....“The easy position would have been to be against the assault weapons ban,” said Weaver, pushing back on the idea that Sanders catered to the NRA for political purposes. (Weaver made the comments before the Charleston shooting.)

Still, people recall that Sanders, then the four-term mayor of Burlington, was cautious not to step in. “Bernie let the NRA do his dirty work on that one to sink Smith. He played it very close to the vest,” said Garrison Nelson, a professor at University of Vermont who has known Sanders for around four decades.
Instead, Sanders said that he didn’t support the proposed Brady Bill, which instituted federal background checks and a five-day waiting period, and vowed that he wouldn’t flip-flop on the issue. He won the election by nearly 20 points.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/bernie-sanders-awkward-history-with-guns-in-america-119185.html#ixzz3hcmmxBDl