Politico:

New York’s junior senator, a passionate Clinton backer and feminist, broke down during an emotional sit-down here for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast when I asked her about her own conversion from an upstate House member with a 100 percent NRA rating (who once stored a shotgun under her bed) to an upper-chamber anti-gun crusader.

“I was somebody who was not as focused on this, as I should have been, as a House member. Meeting these families devastated me, broke my heart,” said Gillibrand, when I suggested she switched positions as a matter of political expediency in a deep-blue state where most Democrats favor stringent gun restrictions.

Gillibrand, a 49-year-old mother of two young sons not prone to public expressions of emotion, began to cry in mid-sentence. “It’s so crippling — I mean, I sat down with a mother last week in Brooklyn, and she lost her 4-year-old baby … she took her kid to a park,” she said. “Every mom takes their kid to a park. And she took her kid to a park and the kid was killed, a baby, a 4-year-old. … [Sanders] doesn’t have the sensitivity he needs to the horror that is happening in these families. I just don’t think he’s fully getting how horrible it is for these families.”

[ … ]

Her critics (some of them envious members of the state’s uniformly liberal congressional delegation) suggested her wedding with the gun control movement was of the shotgun variety.

But Gillibrand says her whipsaw transformation was genuine. Her mostly white, semi-rural district outside the state capital closely resembles Sanders’ Vermont, and Gillibrand says she’d simply never seen the impact of guns in big cities. She took her first step away from the NRA by introducing a gun-trafficking bill at the behest of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly.

Whatever her initial motivations, Gillibrand possesses the zeal of the converted and sees guns as the issue that will allow Clinton to generate the kind of enthusiasm for her candidacy — especially among women — that has thus far been missing from her candidacy. “This debate is relegated to the men. It’s about hunting? It has nothing to do with hunting,” she said. “Nothing in this debate has to do with hunting, and nothing in this debate has to do with the Second Amendment rights. Nothing. … I think — I see the world in the lens of women’s issues. I’m making everything a woman’s issue. I want guns to be a woman’s issue.”

Clinton, who has been campaigning with African-American mothers whose kids were killed in gun crimes, isn’t going quite far enough, Gillibrand says. She wants a “women’s crusade” on the issue, adding that Clinton “might not have made that connection in her own mind. I’ve made that connection.”

The gun control debate has nothing to do with the second amendment.  Nothing.  Because she says so.  It has to do with being a woman, because only if you’re a woman can you appropriately feel the pain of others and understand what needs to be done to bring motherly control into people’s lives.  She says so.  She’s making it that way.  So don’t confuse the issue for her or anyone else.  Don’t bring up that this motherly control doesn’t have any affect on criminals.  It’s simple, and if you can’t understand that it’s simple, then you’re a man and you just don’t care about women’s issues.

That this is self referentially incoherent doesn’t matter.  If you’re a man, shut up, she argues, just because – and anyway she is a woman and you’re not.  It’s that simple.  This is a woman’s issue.  How does the NRA feel about that A rating now?