WAIT!! I thought the campaign was over!?!?!? We need to locate each and every Senator with a D behind their name and find out why they weren't participating in the latest episode political kabuki theater!!!

Sanders voted against allowing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying gun violence in 1996 and voted against versions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act five times from 1991 to 1993.

Sanders' aides did not respond to multiple requests about why his campaign has not announced a "comprehensive" gun plan as promised.

But the senator from Vermont has reiterated his support for the 2005 immunity law by pointing to the gun culture in his home state.

"I was concerned that in rural areas all over this country, if a gun shop owner sells a weapon legally to somebody and that person then goes out and kills somebody, I don't believe it is appropriate that that gun shop owner who just sold a legal weapon to be held accountable and be sued," he said during a CNN debate this month in a scathing exchange with Clinton.

Oh! Of course it makes PERFECT sense to expect Sanders to have made it to congress for a filibuster that has been widely acknowledged as a surprise event. He should have just totally stopped planning the wind-down of his campaign and the measures he's (pretty obviously) taking to make a transition to supporting Clinton as the nominee, and go join the filibuster in progress! And, of course, had he done so, the author would never suggest that he was still campaigning and just trying to hurt Clinton's chances as the nominee. He's lost. He's winding the campaign down. No need to keep kicking the guy while he's down. Gees.

Bernie's gun record is one of the reasons that I didn't get all Berned up over him in the first place. Odd to be so uber-progressive but not in the realm of the 2nd amendment...

Yeah, gun control issues are a major flaw with Sanders, however if he had made a special effort to be there then you'd just be writing some bitchy, paint-by-numbers post about how Sanders is a looney narcissist trying to make it all about him, blah blah blah...

And now it's time to play the tradition American game of kick-the-loser and malign their character for not jumping through some imaginary hoops and doing whatever *we* think they should be doing instead of what they think they should be doing. Yay us.

I can understand Sanders not being there-he is doing busy-guy things. I can sort of understand (but disagree with) his rational for voting against the Brady Bill. I will never forgive or forget his vote on the CDC. That has hamstrung reasonable efforts for 20 years, and there was no reason to do it other than to pander to the worst segment of the corporate gun lobby. Fucking coward.

@6 Well, she's not a sitting Senator

in all likelihood he's preparing the speech where he'll bow out and endorse Clinton. "suspending my campaign".

@1: soon he'll be back to having an -I after his name.

One of the reasons Sen. Sanders is more popular among independent voters is his independent record on gun control.

What the Democrats are trying to get (assault weapons ban/no-fly, no-buy) aren't very useful, especially if they model the new ban on the old one. That filibuster had tragically low goals, much like the Democratic Party in general.

Thank you, the Stranger. Words are cheap. Bernie can fly off to Italy to grandstand and try to curry favor with Catholics but he can't return to the senate to do his damn job. What else has he got to do?? He doesn't want to piss off his main teat, the NRA.

Nobody should complain about Hillary and guns unless you're one of those unenlisted or nonuniformed assholes who want to hold on to your AR-15 to compensate for who knows what. Nobody beats Hillary on guns.

Rich Smith has shown just what an idiot he is. What a joke. Those senators have no sense of what sensible gun control is, nor should the shooting in Orlando be focusing on guns themselves. Guns are a tool used for good and bad, the disease is the current state of our mental health in America. Constant budget cuts to mental health facilities and programs has lead to a drastic increase of incidents. Even the FBI recently released a by the numbers murder count, and rifles were much lower in numbers than handguns and knives. I already know Rich would like to ban ALL guns, but how come he doesn't call for the banning of knives as well?

The facts are those senators were a joke, same as the rest of congress at this point, and both sides of the anti-gun vs pro-gun argument are morons who missed the point entirely, that our country is in desperate need of funding for those who are suffering from mental illnesses.

ahhh....yes....damn Bernie and Hillary. What was Hillary doing? did she personally go to DC to show support for the filibuster? She should have. Did Obama go to the steps of congress to support the filibuster? He should have.

This article is pathetic.

If your perception is that "The news cycle has been dominated by Trump and Alligators.", that's quite evidently the news you consume.

The rest of us read actual news sites with substantive articles. And yes, he should have been there.

So did they get gun control legislation passed yet, or are they still filibustering?

@6/GermanSausage: "Where is, as the presumptive democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton? Why isn't she out in front on this?" and @17/mt2016: "What was Hillary doing? did she personally go to DC to show support for the filibuster? She should have."

HRC was running for president, and spoke out at length about Orlando repeatedly. Should she have gone to Washington? To do what, exactly? Stand and wave from in front of the Senate?

@14/mandyv is right. Sanders found time to fly from New York to Rome for a weekend, but couldn't make the time to return to the Senate.

Big-D Democrats are doing such a good job of courting Sanders supporters! What could possibly go wrong?

By the way, I had to double-check the byline on this post, because this level of political dipshittery is usually the exclusive domain of Matt Baume.

It is not just the Brady Bill. Sanders in 2005 also voted to limit or eliminate liability for gun manufacturers. The bill protected gun manufacturers, not gun owners.

Check out PBS Frontline article from 2011 on Century International Arms Company, the biggest importer then of foreign guns. They slimmed down the guns to pass import laws . They also ( in 2011 anyway) sold more guns than any other American company to Mexico. Here is why. The guns are inexpensive and very modifiable. Between 2006 and 2011, 500 were recovered from Mexico from drug cartels. One gun review site says you can modify the gun easily to " take on the personality of an AK (" semi automatic,etc.). The stock can be folded to conceal it. I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I just think Bernie is good at getting votes from Vermonters. The company employs 150-200 Vermonters.

Look at the F-35, the most expensive defense dept. boondoggle ever , that he managed to get based in Vermont . Bernie knows how to get elected in Vermont. He was first elected to Congress with the endorsement of the NRA.

Screw Sanders' supporters. Nobody's looking for them. They'll go back to sucking their thumbs and not voting like they did before and she'll still win. And screw him with his nonendorsement, and his running and hiding from the senate filibuster on guns.

I think if Sanders were anything like as smart as many people think he is, it would hardly cut into his preparation time to make the effort to filibuster for the pathetic legislation the Dems are pushing for - it's not like they're trying to take away everything but each household's blunderbuss. How hard can it be to write a concession speech glorifying yourself but asking your supporters to turn their attention to the greater goal of defeating Trump? Can he not do that on the plane? Must he immure himself behind the snowbound bricks of his Vermont hidey-hole? Does writing a speech like that take days of unremitting effort and focus? Or can a seasoned politician be generally trusted to come up with a few graceful words encouraging people to push for more progressive ideas while supporting whatever left-side candidate is the nominee, so that the danger from the right is stomped firmly into the mud?

Even if Bernie didn't have a D- rating from the NRA and were instead a card-carrying member who showed up at gun shows sporting an AR-15 with a thirty-round magazine and a wife-beater that read "One Shot, One Kill," he would still be penny-ante compared to Hillary, the greatest mass-killer in this election by a long shot. Her contributions as senator and Secretary of State to slaughters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Honduras, Colombia, Mexico, Libya, Syria and Yemen put her well past the million mark in number of innocent civilians killed and past the ten million mark in number of innocent civilian refugees generated. And it seems she's just itching to get into a hot war with Russia, given her support of NATO expansion into Russia's immediate neighbors, her State Department's engineering of the coup in Ukraine, and her support for the insurrection in Syria (host to Russia's only military base outside the former USSR.)

Bernie is from a rural open- and concealed-carry state with no license requirement and no significant gun-violence problem. "Progressive" Democrats have no objection when Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell (or our entire state government, for that matter) whore themselves out shamelessly to Microsoft to the detriment of the little people, but heaven forfend that Bernie should accommodate the overwhelming will of his electorate on this issue. Well, I guess it's the only colorably plausible issue they have to attack him with, so they're going to run with it. Keep it up, guys, and see what that gets you when November rolls around, whether or not Hillary is indicted.

YOU LEAVE BERNIE ALONE, YOU MEANIES.

Bernie is forgotten. It would take about 5 minutes to write his concession speech, and most people will not notice it.

@25, Agreed. Sanders has raised important issues, but he's not a very savvy politician. He wants to influence the party platform, yet he has run a campaign based on alienating those he is trying to convince. From charging them with corruption, claiming the system is rigged, appointing Obama & major Democratic Party critic Cornel West to the DNC platform committee, to spending most of his campaign funds on ads and rallies instead of on promoting the down-party ticket progressives he needs to truly start his movement, to running a campaign of white men appealing to other white men, he has made a lot of really stupid moves. I honestly think he'll fade into the political background just like Dean and Nader.

Good thing you aren't running for president, Smith. No Senator's *job* is to filibuster anything. No wonder shit's a mess, assholes like you spread disinformation like pollen in springtime.

@33, Karen Black, nice wrap up. Bernie alienated me not because he ran but the way he ran. I was for him at first and then I was for him as Hillary's VP and then I began to dislike him, and now I can't stand him and probably won't feel kindly toward him until he goes away. I agree, except for your point on Howard Dean. He definitely is not fading.

@16: Yeah, anybody who doesn't believe in your NRA talking points is an idiot.

@16: I notice you conveniently forgot about the handgun death toll, which is about 4 times that of knife homicides. Go drink your own piss.

@14- "Nobody beats Hillary on guns."

Except the NRA. So basically the only people who actually matter have consistently beat Hillary on guns.

Yeah, why isn't the leader of a political peoples revolution fighting everyday to disarm the people and give the state a complete monopoly on force because that's what the "peoples revolution" is all about. What a lot of dumb stick in the mud people don't know of course is that glittering condos and gentrification are really progress and anyone who opposes them is a reactionary hick, and voting for Bernie is basically racist. It's good we have The Stranger to constantly remind us of these things.

Also Karen Black. Cornel West is not a white man, neither is Rosario Dawson, or Harry Belafonte, or State Senator Nina Turner. Or very many people in the State of Hawaii where Bernie won in a landslide, the only state where whites are a minority. Good ol, #berniemademewhite, using racial political correctness to fight for banker/corporate rule, not ironic at all. People are upset that Clinton's campaign is bought and paid for by a small cabal of obscenely rich and powerful white men, how "racist of them. They don't want to see a serial rapist and career criminal back in the White House, how sexist of them. They don't want a candidate who strongly opposed gay rights till her handlers finally told her the polling data suggested she shouldn't, how homophobic of them. And they of course must secretly love the Clintons longtime friend Trump.