Hillary Clinton on Sunday defended the idea of a gun tax, but stopped short of endorsing a proposal she first embraced in 1993.
In an interview with ABC News'
"This Week," the Democratic presidential front-runner, who has refuted GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump's
claim that she wants to abolish the Second Amendment, declared she believes the right to bear arms is protected by the Constitution.
"I have no objection to that, but the rest of the American public has a right to require certain kinds of regulatory responsible actions to protect everyone else," she said.
Noting that in 1993, she supported a gun tax during testimony before a Senate Finance Committee, host George Stephanopoulos pressed Clinton on whether she still felt the same way.
"I'm not going to commit to any specific proposal," she deferred. "That was in the context of health care. When you have mass shootings, you not only have the terrible deaths, you have people who are injured."
Clinton said the issue came up during a weekend meeting with
survivors of the December 2015 terrorist massacre in San Bernardino, Calif.
"What they talked to me about was, where do they get the financial support to deal with both the physical and the emotional trauma?" she said. "There are real costs that people incur because of the terrible gun violence epidemic. And we have to deal with it. And I'm going to be looking for ways to deal with it."
"I'm not committed to anything other than what I've said in this campaign," she added, "but I do want people to ask themselves, can't we do better than to have 33,000 people killed every year by guns and many thousands more injured? And I think we can."
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