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Guns became a flash point in both the primaries and the general election. Bernie Sanders, who loved to talk about how “true progressives” never bow to political realities or powerful interests, had long bowed to the political reality of his rural state of Vermont and supported the NRA’s key priorities, including voting against the Brady Bill five times in the 1990s. In 2005, he voted for that special immunity law that protects gun makers and sellers from being sued when their weapons are used in deadly attacks. The NRA said the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was the most important gun-related legislation in more than twenty years. Then-Senator Barack Obama and I had voted against it. I couldn’t believe Bernie continued to support the law ten years later when he ran for President.

I hammered him on the issue every chance I got. We had a revealing exchange in a town hall debate in March 2016. A man stepped up to the microphone to ask a question. His fourteen-year-old daughter had been shot in the head during a shooting spree outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant. After a few scary days on life support, she pulled through and ended up being the lone survivor of the attack. The father asked what we were going to do to address the epidemic of gun violence stalking our country.

“I am looking at your daughter, and I’m very grateful that she is laughing and she is on a road to recovery,” I said. “But it never should have happened.” I told him about some of the steps I wanted to take to keep families safe, including repealing the immunity protection for gun manufacturers. The moderator then asked Bernie his thoughts about a new lawsuit challenging that corporate immunity. To my surprise, the Senator doubled down. He argued passionately that people like me who talked about suing gun makers were really talking about “ending gun manufacturing in America.” To him, the idea that a manufacturer could be held liable for what happens with its guns was tantamount to saying that “there should not be any guns in America.” I couldn’t have disagreed more strongly. No other industry in our country has the kind of protection he supported for gun manufacturers. And in every other situation, he was the loudest voice in the room calling for corporations to be held accountable for their actions. Why was this one issue so different? As I told the crowd, it was like he was reading straight from the NRA’s talking points. After months of pressure from activists and victims’ families, Bernie finally said he would reconsider his vote.

Bernie and I disagreed on guns, but the Republicans were far more extreme. Just days after terrorists shot and killed fourteen people and seriously injured twenty-two others at an office holiday party in San Bernardino, California, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to stop individuals on the no-fly list from buying guns and explosives. I thought it was a no-brainer that if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you’re too dangerous to buy a gun! But the Republicans refused to defy the NRA.

Then there was Donald Trump. From the start of the campaign, he did everything he could to ingratiate himself with the gun lobby, which may have been wary that a New York billionaire with a history of being sympathetic to gun control wouldn’t be a natural ally. So he overcompensated. He promised to force schools to allow guns in classrooms and to overturn efforts President Obama made to strengthen the background check system. After the rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, in which eight students and one professor were killed, Trump called the attack horrible but didn’t seem to think anything could be done about it. “You’re going to have these things happen,” he said flippantly. After the June attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that killed forty-nine young people, many of them LGBT people of color, Trump said it was “too bad” that people at the club “didn’t have guns attached to their hips”—even though all the research and a growing body count prove that more guns mean more deaths.

Republicans liked to rile up their base with tales about how I was going to shred the Constitution and take away their guns. It didn’t matter that I said the opposite as clearly as I could, including in my acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: “I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I’m not here to take away your guns. I just don’t want you to be shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place.” I was used to being the gun lobby’s favorite villain. But as he so often did, Trump took it to another level. In August 2016, he told a rally in North Carolina that if I were elected President, there’d be no way to stop me from appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. Well, he said, maybe the “Second Amendment people” might find a way to stop me. Many of us took that to mean: maybe someone would shoot me.

Trump’s remark caused a stir in the press. I was particularly concerned that if a “Second Amendment person” came after me, he’d be coming after my security detail of Secret Service agents. His campaign tried to downplay the comment, but everyone heard the innuendo loud and clear. Later, there were reports that the Secret Service told Trump’s team to get their candidate to knock it off.

As for the NRA, it kept its promise to do everything it could to stop me. All told, the gun lobby spent more than $30 million supporting Trump, more money than any other outside group and more than double what it spent to support Mitt Romney in 2012. About two-thirds of that money paid for more than ten thousand negative ads attacking me in battleground states. The organization didn’t have the guts to take on my specific policy proposals—which were widely popular, even with a lot of gun owners. Instead, it went for fearmongering and demonizing. In one ad, a woman is alone in bed when a robber breaks into the house. “Don’t let Hillary leave you protected with nothing but a phone,” the narrator warns, suggesting falsely that I would have stopped law-abiding Americans from having a gun.

I’m sure that some of my fellow Democrats will look at this high-priced onslaught and conclude, as many have in the past, that standing up to the NRA just isn’t worth it. Some may put gun safety on the chopping block alongside reproductive rights as “negotiable,” so as not to distract from populist economics. Who knows—the same might happen to criminal justice reform and racial justice more broadly. That would be a terrible mistake. Democrats should not respond to my defeat by retreating from our strong commitments on these life-or-death issues. The vast majority of Americans agree that we need to do more on gun safety. This is a debate we can win if we keep at it.