Saturday, April 09, 2016

Clinton visits Brooklyn churches to talk gun violence


ERIN DURKIN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
04/03/2016 8:36 PM ET




CRAIG RUTTLE/AP
Hillary Clinton speaks with children after she addressed members of the Christian Cultural Center church in Brooklyn on Sunday.


Hillary Clinton stumped at black churches in Brooklyn Sunday, touting her tough stance on guns as she sought support in her home state’s primary against Bernie Sanders.

Clinton also vowed to improve strained relations between police and black communities — and was joined by Nicole Bell, the fiancée of police shooting victim Sean Bell, who endorsed her Sunday.

“I have been privileged to meet with so many family members who have lost loved ones to gun violence sometimes at the hands of police, most times senseless random terrible violence,” Clinton said at the Christian Cultural Center in Canarsie, one of three borough churches she visited.


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Clinton contrasted her gun control stance with that of Sanders, who she criticized for voting to give immunity to gun makers and against the Brady bill.

“That’s a big difference between me and my opponent,” she said at Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Clinton Hill. “He has voted with the National Rifle Association and the big gun lobby.”

“You have 90 people a day dying from gun violence, 33,000 a year. . . . Gun deaths are the number one cause of death for young African-American men, more than the next nine causes put together,” she said.




Clinton highlighted the cases of Bell, who was shot to death by police outside a Queens club just before his wedding in 2006 — a case she said made her “heartsick” as a New York senator. She also cited Trayvon Martin, the Florida teen killed by a self-styled neighborhood watchman, whom she said was “stalked” and then killed “for no reason whatsoever” by “a man who was empowered by a gun.”


COREY SIPKIN/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Hillary Clinton contrasted her gun control stance with that of Bernie Sanders while speaking at a Brooklyn church Sunday.


“We have to end the epidemic of gun violence. We have to end racial profiling. We have to provide the training for our police officers,” Clinton said.

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Clinton and Sanders, who both have New York ties, have been competing aggressively for votes in the primary on April 19. Clinton, who lives in Chappaqua in Westchester County, was a senator from New York for eight years. Sanders, a Vermont senator, is originally from Brooklyn and still speaks with a discernible accent.

A Quinnipiac poll released last week showed Clinton leading Sanders in New York by 54% to 42%.


COREY SIPKIN/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Hillary Clinton sits next to Nicole Bell, center, at the Christian Cultural Center church in Brooklyn on Sunday.


Clinton got a warm reception at the Brooklyn churches. After her remarks at Christian Cultural Center, a megachurch on Flatlands Ave., influential pastor A.R. Bernard took a shot at Sanders, saying he never thought he’d see an “openly announced socialist” on a presidential ticket.

“This is nothing against Bernie Sanders, but socialism is great in theory, but we’ve seen what it is in practice with the birth and collapse of the Soviet Union in Russia and what it left,” he said.

Clinton also said she’d appear with Gov. Cuomo on Monday as he signs a bill to hike the minimum wage to $15.

“I’m proud that in many of these areas New York is leading the way,” she said at Mount Pisgah Baptist Church in Beford-Stuyvesant.

And she played up her ties to President Obama, under whom she served as secretary of state.

“I don’t think he gets the credit we deserve for digging us out of that big ditch that we were in,” she said.

edurkin@nydailynews.com




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