ET Williams

The Doctor of Common Sense

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Pharmaceutical Company Gates CEO Arrested After Woman Overdoses: What About All The Other Drug Co., And Drugs That The Government Approves

He should go to jail but what about the doctor’s and pharmacies?

The mother of a woman who died last year from an overdose says she cried tears of joy when she watched a former drug company CEO from Gates get arrested. 

Laurence Doud is accused of selling billions of dollars worth of highly addictive pain killers to pharmacies. News10NBC wanted to know if any of those pharmacies are here so we poured through pages of court documents to find out.  

The court documents say no. They say most of the pharmacies are independent and downstate. The one pharmacy that got named in a separate filing is on Long Island. 

Police say the kinds of drugs involved in this case fueled the overdose crisis. 

Patty Suppa lost her daughter Christina last year. 

“The epidemic was bigger than her,” Suppa sid. 

Christina Farsace had two young children. Suppa says her daughter battled addiction and got hooked on pain killers after knee surgery. Farsace’s picture is on a Gates Police van, showing the faces of people who died from an overdose.

News10NBC Chief Investigative Reporter Berkeley Brean: “When you saw that former CEO get walked down the street in New York City and get charged, what did you think and feel?”

Patty Suppa, daughter died from overdose: “I cried with joy. It’s a step and it’s a huge step in the right direction.”

Doud is the former CEO of Rochester Drug Cooperative or RDC. It’s the 6th largest drug distributor in the country. Doud was charged by the U.S. Attorney in New York City on Tuesday. 

In court documents, prosecutors say, despite getting warned by his own staff, Doud knowingly broke federal laws to sell huge amounts of pain killers like oxycodone and fentanyl to pharmacies that he was, again, warned were using the drugs illegally. And prosecutors say he did it just to make money. 

Doud became RDC’s CEO in 1991. He was fired by RDC two years ago. 

News10NBC asked RDC to talk to us on camera. Instead, they referred to the two-page statement they released Tuesday which read in part, “We made mistakes. We accept responsibility for those mistakes. We can do better. We are doing better and we will do better. “

RDC ageed to pay a $20 million fine and as long as it runs properly for three years, the company won’t get charged. The feds say Doud turned RDC into a multi-billion dollar company. 

“All the billions of dollars that man made, well give it back to Rochester New York where these families died,” Suppa said, “and open up rehab centers and detox and more beds for females.”

Doud is suing RDC, saying he was illegally fired and made a scape-goat for all the problems. 

The group called Gates to Recovery is holding a protest outside RDC Friday evening. They’re calling it “From Greed to Grief Rally.” 

On Wednesday, Monroe County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo said the county added RDC to the list of drug companies it’s suing for “fanning the flames of addiction.”

In the past year, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office says 166 people died from an overdose. 

https://www.whec.com/news/mother-of-overdose-victim-on-arrest-of-ex-gates-drug-company-ceo-i-cried-with-joy/5329019/

Opioid Overdose Crisis

In the west we have become drug junkies.

Every day, more than 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids.1 The misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl—is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total “economic burden” of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.2

How did this happen?

In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates. This subsequently led to widespread diversion and misuse of these medications before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive.3,4 Opioid overdose rates began to increase. In 2017, more than 47,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose, including prescription opioids, heroin, and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.1That same year, an estimated 1.7 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers, and 652,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder (not mutually exclusive).5

What do we know about the opioid crisis?

  • Roughly 21 to 29 percent of patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them.6
  • Between 8 and 12 percent develop an opioid use disorder.7–9
  • An estimated 4 to 6 percent who misuse prescription opioids transition to heroin.7–9
  • About 80 percent of people who use heroin first misused prescription opioids.7
  • Opioid overdoses increased 30 percent from July 2016 through September 2017 in 52 areas in 45 states.10
  • The Midwestern region saw opioid overdoses increase 70 percent from July 2016 through September 2017.10
  • Opioid overdoses in large cities increase by 54 percent in 16 states.10
The graph shows that the Northeast had the highest rate of suspected opioid overdose in Q3 of 2017. Rates in the Midwest have increased largely between Q2 and Q3 of 2017.

Quarterly rate of suspected opioid overdose, by US region
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.10

This issue has become a public health crisis with devastating consequences including increases in opioid misuse and related overdoses, as well as the rising incidence of neonatal abstinence syndrome due to opioid use and misuse during pregnancy. The increase in injection drug use has also contributed to the spread of infectious diseases including HIV and hepatitis C. As seen throughout the history of medicine, science can be an important part of the solution in resolving such a public health crisis.

What are HHS and NIH doing about it?

In response to the opioid crisis, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is focusing its efforts on five major priorities:

  1. improving access to treatment and recovery services
  2. promoting use of overdose-reversing drugs
  3. strengthening our understanding of the epidemic through better public health surveillance
  4. providing support for cutting-edge research on pain and addiction
  5. advancing better practices for pain management

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a component of HHS, is the nation’s leading medical research agency helping solve the opioid crisis via discovering new and better ways to prevent opioid misuse, treat opioid use disorders, and manage pain. In the summer of 2017, NIH met with pharmaceutical companies and academic research centers to discuss:

  1. safe, effective, non-addictive strategies to manage chronic pain
  2. new, innovative medications and technologies to treat opioid use disorders
  3. improved overdose prevention and reversal interventionsto save lives and support recovery

In April 2018 at the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit, NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., announced the launch of the HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Initiative, an aggressive, trans-agency effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/opioids/opioid-overdose-crisis

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Hillary Clinton Wants Trump Indicted, But Almost 30k Of Her Emails Were Sent To Foreign Entity And The FBI Did Nothing

A member of the House Committee on the Judiciary said during a hearing Thursday that a government watchdog found that nearly all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails were sent to a foreign entity and that the FBI didn’t follow-up on that finding.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found an “anomaly on Hillary Clinton’s emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list,” Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said during a hearing with FBI official Peter Strzok.

“It was going to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia,” he added.

Gohmert said the ICIG investigator, Frank Rucker, presented the findings to Strzok, but that the FBI official did not do anything with the information.

Strzok acknowledged meeting with Rucker, but said he did not recall the “specific content.”

“The forensic examination was done by the ICIG and they can document that,” Gohmert said, “but you were given that information and you did nothing with it.”

He also said that someone alerted the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz to the issue.

“Mr. Horowitz got a call four times from someone wanting to brief him about this, and he never returned the call,” Gohmert said.

The ICIG previously caught problems regarding Clinton’s server that the FBI missed. The bureau didn’t notice that some emails were openly marked classified with a “(C)” when they were sent.

The ICIG spotted the oversight after the FBI missed it, texts between Strzok and his mistress, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, show.

“Holy cow,” Strzok wrote, “if the FBI missed this, what else was missed? … Remind me to tell you to flag for Andy [redacted] emails we (actually ICIG) found that have portion marks (C) on a couple of paras. DoJ was Very Concerned about this.”

In late 2017, ICIG Chuck McCullough — who was appointed by former President Barack Obama —  took the unusual step of coming forward publicly to say that he perceived pushback after he began raising the alarm about issues with Clinton’s servers to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

He said he found it “maddening” that Democrats, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, were underselling the amount of classified information on the server.

McCullough said he “expected to be embraced and protected,” but was instead “chided” by someone on Capitol Hill for failing to consider the “political consequences” of his investigative findings, Fox News reported.

The ICIG has not publicly disclosed the findings Gohmert described in the meeting between Rucker and Strzok, but the congressman said the watchdog can document them.

Thursday’s exchange is below:

Gohmert: You said earlier in this hearing you were concerned about a hostile foreign power affecting the election. Do you recall the former Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough having an investigation into an anomaly found on Hillary Clinton’s emails?

Let me refresh your memory. The Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough sent his investigator Frank Rucker along with an IGIC attorney Janette McMillan to brief you and Dean Chapelle and two other FBI personnel who I won’t name at this time, about an anomaly they had found on Hillary Clinton’s emails that were going to the private unauthorized server that you were supposed to be investigating?

Strzok: I remember meeting Mr. Rucker on either one or two occasions. I do not recall the specific content or discussions.

Gohmert: Mr. Rucker reported to those of you, the four of you there, in the presence of the ICIG attorney, that they had found this anomaly on Hillary Clinton’s emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list. It was a compartmentalized bit of information that was sending it to an unauthorized source. Do you recall that?

Strozk: Sir, I don’t.

Gohmert: He went on the explain it. And you didn’t say anything, you thanked him, you shook his hand. The problem is it was going to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia and from what you’ve said here, you did nothing more than nod and shake the man’s hand when you didn’t seem to be all that concerned about our national integrity of our election when it was involving Hillary Clinton. So the forensic examination was done by the ICIG — and they can document that — but you were given that information and you did nothing with it. And one of the things I found most egregious with Mr. Horowitz’s testimony, and — by the way Mr. Horowitz got a call four times from someone wanting to brief him about this, and he never returned the call.

https://gohmert.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398647

FBI MISSED CLINTON EMAILS OPENLY MARKED CLASSIFIED, WANTED TO CONCLUDE PROBE BEFORE IG CAUGHT MISTAKE

The FBI didn’t notice that some emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were marked classified with a “(C)” when they were sent — something that seemingly would have been one of the first and most obvious checks in an investigation, and one that FBI agents instantly recognized put the facts at odds with Clinton’s public statements.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General spotted it after the FBI missed it, texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, reveal. “Holy cow,” Strzok wrote, “if the FBI missed this, what else was missed?”

“Remind me to tell you to flag for Andy [redacted] emails we (actually ICIG) found that have portion marks (C) on a couple of paras. DoJ was Very Concerned about this,” he wrote.

“Found on the 30k [emails] provided to State originally. No one noticed. It cuts against ‘I never sent or received anything marked classified,’” he wrote, referring to statements by Clinton downplaying the danger of her email practices.

Much of the more in-depth investigation considered whether Clinton and her aides emailed materials that were classified but were not marked as such, a harder determination to make.

The exchange occurred on June 12, 2016. FBI Director Jim Comey disclosed the findings of marked-classified emails to the House on July 7.

On May 10, 2016, Strzok had suggested that in his mind, the investigation was closer to being finished than to just getting started — suggesting that if it weren’t for the inspector general, it might have closed down and cleared her despite missing the most obvious first step.

“I cannot overstate to you the sense of urgency about wanting to logically and effectively conclude this investigation,” he said.

The ommission allowed Clinton to repeatedly and prominently state that she had “never received nor sent any material that was marked classified” on her private email server while secretary of state.

She even said so at major debates, and because the FBI hadn’t caught the letter (C), and therefore never stated its findings, PolitiFact rated the claim “Half True.”

When the FBI belatedly noticed and relayed the truth, the fact-checking site said “Now we know it’s just plain wrong.”

Clinton decided to print out 55,000 pages instead of providing the State Department with her emails in their digital format, a technique sometimes used by lawyers to make searches harder for their opponents. A CTRL-F search for “(C)” could have missed the markings because State had to re-digitize the forms with Optical Character Recognition, which can get tripped up on symbols, perhaps interpreting it as something like “[C]” or a copyright symbol. Nonetheless, the classified marker always appears at the beginning of a paragraph and is visually distinct.

Markings denoting the different levels within the category of “classified” information include, in order: (C) for confidential, (S) for secret, and (TS) for top secret.

The comments come from 500 pages of texts released Wednesday by Senate investigators.

https://dailycaller.com/2018/02/07/fbi-clinton-emails-marked-classified/

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President Trump Calls Morning Joe A Psycho, And Says CNN Ratings Suck

Morning Joe and his insane wife have been insane for years so there nothing new here.

President Donald Trump recommended his favorite morning political talk show on Twitter Tuesday morning while condemning MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” which he dubbed “Morning Psycho (Joe).”

Trump tweeted that “Fox & Friends” is “by far the best of the morning political shows on television. It rightfully has BY FAR the highest ratings, not even close. Morning Psycho (Joe), who helped get me elected in 2016 by having me on (free) all the time, has nosedived, too Angry … ”

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

Sorry to say but @foxandfriends is by far the best of the morning political shows on television. It rightfully has BY FAR the highest ratings, not even close. Morning Psycho (Joe), who helped get me elected in 2016 by having me on (free) all the time, has nosedived, too Angry…47.3K6:44 AM – Apr 23, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacy21.2K people are talking about this

The president then aimed his animus at CNN’s morning coverage, reserving special criticism for Chris Cuomo, who was “rewarded with a now successful prime time slot, despite his massive failure in the morning. Only on CNN!” 

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

….Dumb and Sick. A really bad show with low ratings – and will only get worse. CNN has been a proven and long term ratings and beyond disaster. In fact, it rewarded Chris Cuomo with a now unsuccessful prime time slot, despite his massive failure in the morning. Only on CNN!45.8K6:54 AM – Apr 23, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacy19.6K people are talking about this

CNN’s ratings have tanked ever since the release of the Mueller report and have reached an all-year low in April. From April 8-12, the network had an average audience of 690,000 people. In comparison, MSNBC averaged a total viewership of 1,600,000, viewers and Fox News averaged 2,438,000. Nighttime MSNBC host Rachel Maddox has also seen her viewers disappear.

Joe Scarborough, who was once a conservative commentator, reinvented himself as a severe anti-Trumper who has even asked whether the president’s lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has “dementia.”

The morning TV show host has also said Trump has mental health problems. 

The MSNBC host also predicted that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would not receive Senate confirmation and that the Republican Party had put itself in a “no-win situation” defending him.

https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/23/trump-buries-morning-psycho-joe-lauds-fox-friends/

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The Measles Outbreak Is Back And It Is Because Of Illegal Immigrants! Don’t Believe liberal lies.

You have nothing the fear but dying.

NEW YORK (AP) — Outbreaks in New York state continue to drive up the number of U.S. measles cases, which are approaching levels not seen in 25 years.

Health officials say 71 more cases were reported last week, with 68 of them from New York. That brings this year’s total to 626.

That is already the most since 2014, when 667 were reported for the whole year. The most before that was 963 cases in 1994.

Twenty-two states have reported cases, but the vast majority have been in New York — mainly in New York City and in nearby Rockland County. Most of the New York cases have been unvaccinated people in Orthodox Jewish communities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the latest numbers Monday.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2019-04-22/new-york-outbreaks-drive-us-measles-count-up-to-626


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Elizabeth Warren Wants To Cancel Student Loan Debt, And Make The Wealthy Pay For Universal Child Care, And Give Free College

Liberals Just Don’t Get It. It Is Not The Taxpayers job To Bail You Out Of Your Worthless College Debt.

In the escalating battle of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates to see who can offer the most free stuff, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has taken the extraordinary step of calling for having the government forgive student loan debt. This pander will not only be incredibly costly, but it will be a slap in the face to those who have already struggled to pay off their student loans without government assistance.

The political logic is understandable for Warren, who has been struggling to break through in polls. Like most other candidates, Warren has promised to deliver free college. But free college doesn’t do much for millennials, who make up a sizable portion of the Democratic electorate. They are already past college age and mostly are not old enough to have kids nearing college. But what they do have is a mountain of student loan debt, so promising to cancel all of their debt would have a huge impact on their finances.

Right now, more than a third of millennials have student loan debt, and studies have shown that the debt is leading them to delay major life decisions including purchasing a house, saving for retirement, and even getting married and having kids. Total student loan debt is now at $1.6 trillion in the United States, making the money owed high than auto loans and credit card debt and trailing only mortgages in terms of the value of various forms of consumer credit. Unlike other forms of debt that are spread across the whole population, student loan debt is concentrated mostly among younger Americans.

What Warren is proposing is to offer debt cancellation of up to $50,000 to more than 42 million people, or 95% of those with debt. She says that will completely wipe out debt for 75% of borrowers with student loans.

Aside from the cost, which, like her child care proposal, she claims would be covered by her ultramillionaires tax, the plan would be tremendously unfair to those who have been struggling for years to pay off their student loans.

It’s true, some people may simply earn too little to make a dent in student loans no matter how hard they work and no matter how much they reduce their expenses. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

There are those who may have taken higher-paying jobs they didn’t necessarily want to pay off loans. And there are those who have cut expenses to the bare bones to pay off loans while watching their friends with similar salaries eat out and travel and deprioritize paying off loans. Those who were more responsible will feel justifiably enraged at the idea that those who may have been more profligate will now get a bailout from the government.

This is the worst sort of pander from an increasingly desperate politician.

Update: This post has generated quite the angry response on Twitter. Admittedly, the volume of scatological hate tweets are making it difficult to discern intelligent counterarguments. As far as I can tell, most of the responses boil down to mocking my piece with sarcastic arguments structured as: “People have been enduring X and it’s bad, so we should oppose any policies that would prevent X in the future.” An example is: Saying student loan forgiveness would be unfair to those who struggled to pay off their loans would be like saying, we can’t cure cancer, because it would be unfair to those who already died from the disease.

Unlike those other examples, simply saying the government will cancel everybody’s loans does not solve the underlying issues associated with the rising cost of attending college in the same way that a theoretical cancer cure would actually eliminate the disease. This is only true if you believe government declaring something free is the equivalent of it having no cost.

Curing cancer would not have negative impacts on those who already suffered from cancer, whereas if the government were to take on the cost of student loans, it would be a burden that would be placed on other citizens either in the form of higher taxes or more debt. While Warren insists that her plan would be paid for by taxing ultramillionaires, she has already promised that ultramillionaires would be paying for a wide range of her policy proposals. In reality, should she be elected her agenda would not be able to be financed without higher taxes on the middle-class, as is the case in other nations with the type of social welfare state she envisions. Money is fungible, too, and a tax on ultramillionaires being used to pay for student loan cancellation is revenue that is then not available to pay for other government priorities.

Those who made decisions such as going to a less expensive school that may not have been their top choice, taking a suboptimal job, or living more frugally, will not receive the same benefits from government as those who went to the more expensive school, took the job they wanted, or lived in a more profligate manner.

Furthermore, there is no moral hazard issue involved with curing cancer. That is, paying off student loans would be another signal from the federal government that those who may be engaging in less responsible behavior will eventually be bailed out by government while those who make responsible decisions will receive no benefit. As we contemplate what to do about the long-term entitlement crisis, this sends a horrible signal — that there’s no reason to be a sucker and manage money wisely now, because at the end of the day, the government will always be there to step in.

Finally, some have argued that my post is somehow a generational middle finger from the baby boomers (who had significantly lower college costs) to millennials. Yet the early millennials are now 38 years old, and many of them fit into the category of those who worked diligently (or have been working hard) to pay off their hefty student loan debts.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/elizabeth-warrens-plan-to-cancel-student-loan-debt-would-be-a-slap-in-the-face-to-all-those-who-struggled-to-pay-off-their-loans

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Kamala Harris Promises Gun Control If Congress Doesn’t Pass Legislation While She Is President

She Does Not Have To Worry About Signing And Executive Order Because She Will Never Be President.
Willie Brown The Pimp Is How She Got Started In Politics

(CNN)Sen. Kamala Harris on Monday pledged that, if elected President, she would take executive action enacting sweeping gun control measures if Congress fails to send comprehensive legislation to her desk in her first 100 days.”Enough,” says the fact sheet outlining the proposals that the campaign plans to unveil publicly tomorrow. “We’re not waiting any longer.”The pledge by Harris to act unilaterally by executive action sharpens her repeated calls on the campaign trail, blasting Congress for failing to act on gun violence, especially mass shootings.Last weekend at her town hall in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Harris told the crowd, “It is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away. We need leaders in Washington, D.C., who have the courage to speak the truth.”The plan, as outlined in her proposal, aims to move closer to federal universal background checks, a first-step move the campaign calls “mandated near-universal background checks.” The campaign says this 100-day pledge is just part of the gun safety agenda Harris will pursue as President.”These are practical solutions and will save lives,” said Kris Brown, president of the gun safety group the Brady Campaign. The Brady Bill, passed a quarter decade ago, was a powerful tool requiring federal background checks. But as the Internet came of age, private sellers increasingly turned to the web and were not required to conduct background checks under the law.Harris’ proposal, said Brown, would update the federal law with modern times.”What people want is for dangerous people to not have easy access to guns,” Brown said. “When I look at each of these proposals, that’s what she’s achieving.”The proposal comes from the decades-long former prosecutor who recently pointed out that she herself is a gun owner.Harris’ pledge lays out four points. The first would mandate what the proposal calls “near-universal background checks by requiring anyone who sells five or more guns per year to run a background check on all gun sales.” The target is to classify that seller of more than five guns as a dealer of firearms. A recent CNN investigation highlighted the problem of unlicensed gun dealing in America. An aide said the campaign read the investigation as it was crafting the proposal.Another part of Harris’ proposal would revoke the licenses of gun manufacturers and dealers who break the law and, for the worst cases, the Harris plan would make them criminally liable. It would also fine gun corporations up to $500,000 for each violation, using that money for community-based violence intervention programs and mental health treatment. Currently, a 2005 law called the Protection of Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) shields the gun industry from liability when third parties use weapons for criminal purposes, but not from the federal government, argues Harris.Harris’ plan also reverses a Trump administration action that narrowed the definition of “fugitive from justice,” which allows a gun sale unless a person can be shown to have fled a state for the purpose of avoiding charges. Anyone with an outstanding arrest warrant would be denied from purchasing a gun under Harris’ proposal.The Harris plan also expands a federal law that prohibits gun sales to domestic violence abusers. Currently, federal law prohibits those sales to a married partner convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors. Harris would apply that law where an abuser is a dating partner.The Harris campaign makes clear this is an opening salvo in a larger part of her gun safety agenda. Harris has pledged on the campaign trail to enact universal background checks, renew the assault weapons ban and prohibit those convicted of a federal hate crime from purchasing guns.”The politics on gun safety have absolutely changed,” said Peter Ambler, executive director and co-founder of Giffords, the gun safety organization founded by and bearing the name of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot while in office.Ambler recalled that John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, once donned a duck hunting outfit to align himself to gun owners. Today, many of the Democratic candidates routinely talk about fighting the NRA and gun safety measures.But the shift in Democratic sentiment on gun legislation is likely to haunt at least one contender. Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2005 voted for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the law that Harris is targeting in her gun policy rollout. During the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton blasted Sanders for the vote that led to the law shielding the gun industry. Sanders pledged at the time he would act to repeal it.”It has gone from the third rail to a main issue that will provide a key contrast to Donald Trump,” Ambler said. “Being first with a proposal like this speaks to Sen. Harris’ courage and the degree to which she’s speaking to the issue. It’s a bold proposal.”

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/politics/kamala-harris-gun-proposal/index.html