At town halls across New Hampshire, gun safety advocates are confronting Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) for voting down bipartisan legislation expanding background checks for gun purchases. In April, Ayotte joined 45 senators to oppose the measure, which is supported by more than 90 percent of Americans, claiming that she was trying to protect gun shop owners from the burden of running additional background checks for sales conducted at gun shows or online.

But during a town hall in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire Ayotte offered an additional reason for killing the popular measure and said, falsely, that it could lead to the creation of a national registry. The first-term senator was then “spirited away by her aides” before reporters could ask her about the claim:

When another man rose to ask Ayotte to explain why she voted against expanding background checks, several people in the audience of more than 250 people applauded.

“I know people have strong feelings about this issue,” Ayotte began. She said she voted against the bipartisan compromise on background checks last month because she believed gun owners would face an undue burden and she feared it could lead to a federal gun registry.

She did not tell the crowd here that the legislation called for a felony punishment for gun shop owners who tried to create a permanent registry.

“I thought the focus should be on fixing the current background check system and mental health,” Ayotte said. She declined interview requests, but when asked by ABC News whether she believed her vote was being mischaracterized, she paused and said, “Yes,” before being spirited away by aides.

Indeed, federally licensed gun dealers have conducted background checks for more than 40 years without ever creating a national gun registry, which federal law specifically prohibits. Under the bipartisan amendment offered by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), federal dealers would conduct screenings for private sellers and keep the record; the federal government would not. Then, if a gun is recovered at a violent crime, law enforcement can use the records to track down the perpetrator. All information identifying the buyer generated by the background check would be destroyed by law enforcement within 24 hours.

The Manchin-Toomey amendment explicitly bans the federal government from creating a registry in three different places and treats the misuse of records for the pursue of building a registry as a felony punishable by 15 years in prison.

Since opposing the measure, Ayotte saw her approval ratings plummet by 15 points, leading the National Rifle Association, to start running radio ads in her defense.

WARREN, NH — Women in full-time year-round jobs earned 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Yet, at a town hall earlier this week, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) claimed that Congress has done enough to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work. Indeed, she justified her vote against legislation intended to prevent employers from dodging federal equal pay law with an excuse similar to the National Rifle Association’s explanation for why we do not need any more gun laws — we just need to enforce the ones we have:

QUESTION: My grandmother, who was an extremely intelligent woman, trained many, many men who then became her boss, and so on and so forth. [She] never received a pension, never, um, was really paid what she was worth. And I was disappointed that you voted against the Equal Pay Act, but maybe there was something in the bill that you thought would be detrimental to the economy or whatever. But I was curious if you could explain your philosophy about equal pay and how, maybe, you could suggest something that we could all agree upon so that women would stop making 75 cents for every dollar a man makes . . . .

AYOTTE: We have existing laws — Title VII, um, Lilly Ledbetter, all those existing protections in place — that, I believe, enforce and provide that people doing equal jobs are, certainly in this country, should receive equal pay. So, uh, that bill, in my view, didn’t add — in fact I think it created a lot of additional burdens that would have been hard, um, to make it more difficult for job creators to create jobs. . . . The reason that I voted against that specific bill is that, I looked at it, and there were already existing laws that need to be enforced and can be enforced and I didn’t feel like adding that layer was going to help us better get at the equal pay issue.

Watch it:

It should go without saying that, if similarly situated women are not making the same amount as their male colleagues, then we aren’t doing enough to close this pay gap. So Ayotte’s suggestion that our current laws are sufficient cannot be squared with the reality facing women in the workplace. The backbone of modern workplace discrimination law was formed by the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it is indeed true that the pay gap narrowed significantly in the quarter-century after these workplace protections became law. According to data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, however, progress on the pay gap stalled in the 1990s, and has been only slightly more than flat ever since:

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Ayotte refers to in her remarks, overruled an erroneous Supreme Court decision that reduced existing protections for women. It did not expand workers’ rights beyond what they already enjoyed prior to the Supreme Court’s decision to roll back civil rights law.

The bill that Ayotte opposed was the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would hardly “make it more difficult for job creators to create jobs,” as Ayotte suggests. Currently, employers can escape liability under the Equal Pay Act even if they engaged in completely irrational discrimination that impacts a female worker. The Paycheck Fairness Act would change this to ensure that employer’s pay decisions are rooted in legitimate business reasons to pay one employee more than another — reasons like “education, training, or experience” — and not something completely arbitrary. It also provides a few additional protections to women, such as forbidding employers from retaliating against employees who try to discover how their pay compares to that of their colleagues.

So when Ayotte voted against this bill, she stood up for employer’s rights to make completely irrational judgments about how much a female worker should be paid, and their right to retaliate against employees who are trying to figure out if they are being treated fairly.

TILTON, NH — The daughter of the elementary school principal who died during the Sandy Hook shooting walked out of a town hall with Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) on Tuesday after the event erupted in chaos over the lawmaker’s answer to a question about gun regulations. Ayotte was one of 46 senators to vote down a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks to gun shows and online purchases.

Erica Lafferty left in frustration as Ayotte attempted to answer a question about framing the gun safety debate as a public health crisis. The first-term senator began saying that she would concentrate on “criminal activity with guns” before Zandra Rice Hawkins, a member of the group Granite State Progress, interrupted and asked, “So why do you let them get the guns in the first place?”

Watch the video:

The question led to a round of booing and cross argumentation between gun safety activists and Ayotte supporters in the room. Lafferty walked out as other proponents of stricter gun laws held up signs reading “shame on you.”

After the event was over, Hawkins attempted to approach Ayotte to ask if she would hold a town hall about gun violence. But she was shoved away by a large man who did not appear to be a law enforcement official. ThinkProgress asked a local sheriff who was attending the event if the man was in fact a police officer and the sheriff dodged the question, saying only “he has the right to be here.”

Watch the video:

At an earlier town hall, Lafferty directly confronted Ayotte over her vote. “You had mentioned that the burden to owners of gun stores that these expanded background checks would cause,” Lafferty said. “I’m just wondering why the burden of my mother being gunned down in the hall of her elementary school isn’t as important as that?”

Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) have a lot in common. Both are Republicans. Both are very conservative senators from blue states. And both benefited from the 2010 GOP wave election. Toomey, however, co-sponsored legislation that would have expanded background checks for gun sales, while Ayotte opposed this popular proposal.

Both are now reaping what they sowed.

According to a new Quinnipiac University poll released today, Toomey now enjoys the highest approval rating of his entire Senate term. In one month, his approval rating spiked from 43 percent to 48 percent. Meanwhile, Ayotte’s approval rating dropped by 15 points according to a Public Policy Polling survey conducted earlier this week.

Ayotte won her initial race for the Senate by 23 points in 2010, yet the PPP poll finds that she would lose a reelection fight against Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan if the election were held today.