A mass shooting at a high school in Georgia, where a gunman killed two teachers and two students Wednesday, reignited an all-too-familiar debate in Washington: Advocates for tighter regulation and their political allies decried the state of U.S. gun policy, while opponents directed blame at the individual shooter and society at large.
As this all unfolds during an unprecedented sprint for the White House, gun control advocates see a chance for their issue to actually take hold. Kamala Harris stopped in the middle of a New Hampshire rally to go “off-script” and address the shooting in Georgia. Just weeks ago, the Democratic National Convention also featured former prominent gun violence survivors.
“This is the first presidential campaign where gun safety has been held up as a core issue,” Giffords Executive Director Emma Brown told NOTUS said of Harris’ presidential campaign right before the convention. “That’s a really big deal for the progress that we’ve made on gun violence prevention in the last decade.”
There is an obvious political upside for Harris to embrace calls for gun reform with key voting demographics like young people and women.
The GOP, meanwhile, has been less bullish — at least rhetorically — on the Second Amendment this election cycle than in years past.
The Republican National Convention platform made no mention of guns, neither protecting nor promoting them. The GOP dedicated an entire day to the theme “Make America Safe Again,” but gun reform apparently wasn’t a part of that plan. The most significant attention the convention paid to guns was by hosting an AR-15 raffle.
Part of the reasoning might be that the party’s posture toward guns is growing unpopular with young people. And it doesn’t help that the NRA and its leader was found liable in a civil corruption case and the organization has faced flagging fundraising.
There’s also the reality that Trump himself is now a survivor of gun violence. He has pinned the assassination attempt on the shooter rather than the assault weapon he held. But Democrats see a situation ripe to call out perceived GOP hypocrisy on the issue.
March for Our Lives spokesperson Ryan Barto told NOTUS: “It’s really about posing that question to [Trump] — as someone who is now a victim of gun violence — ‘Will you stand up for other victims?’”
Still, some didn’t always see Democrats making gun reform a priority this cycle. President Joe Biden’s campaign could have done more to maximize what they believe is a widely popular issue area, these candidates and strategists said.
Biden himself had a hearty gun safety record, launching the inaugural Office of Gun Violence Prevention and ushering the first gun safety legislation in decades through Congress. During a speech on Thursday, Biden again called for change: “As a nation, we cannot continue to accept the carnage of gun violence.” When he was the candidate for the Democratic nomination, though, the president primarily leveraged abortion, democracy and the economy to drive his campaign messaging instead of gun safety.
“The issue of ending gun violence has not been nearly as prominent as it should in this election cycle,” former Rep. Mondaire Jones — who has centered gun reform in his heated bid to return to the House — told NOTUS in July.
“It’s an opportunity for Democrats to remind the American people that Republicans have been making us less safe every single day,” he said.
As the Harris team tried to find its sea legs in early August, activists still felt the impact of the Biden campaign’s modest tact. At the time, the federal policy director of gun safety group Brady, Mark Collins, told NOTUS that the gun reform “may have dropped out as a top five” voter issue this campaign cycle, though it retained significance among the essential 18- to 34-year-old electorate.
Biden made a gun safety campaign push in the days before he withdrew as the party nominee. Since then, Harris and Tim Walz have repeatedly emphasized gun control. Collins has noticed the shift: “Harris has made it a top issue of her campaign.”
Walz, particularly, who once championed gun access but tacked left on the issue after Sandy Hook (his NRA rating crashed from an A to an F), has become one of the campaign’s biggest messengers.
The DNC also featured prominent gun violence survivors, including former Rep. Gabby Giffords and Rep. Lucy McBath. Both took the stage on the final day, pointing the prime-time spotlight at gun safety.
Gun safety activists told NOTUS that they hear her loud and clear. Gun rights gurus hear her too.
“Should Vice President Kamala Harris be elected to the White House, you would be ushering in not just the same policies for gun control that you’ve seen come out of the Biden White House, but I think you’d see a renewed and further effort,” said Mark Oliva, director of public affairs for the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
To Oliva and other gun activists, Harris is a serious-enough threat that they hope to spur gun owners to the ballot box.
A recent boom in new, ethnically diverse gun owners complicates the equation for both sides. Since the pandemic, millions of Americans have purchased their first firearm. Gun activists salivate for a fresh crop of Second Amendment defenders.
But the problem for Republicans, and the opportunity for Democrats, is that renewed attention on gun safety is precisely what many young people want — and young people are exactly who the Harris campaign is built to target.
Gun violence ranks as the fourth-most important topic for young voters, per an April Harvard Youth Poll. Fifty-four percent of respondents, including 41% of Republicans, ranked gun violence the first or second issue facing the country. Among Democrats, it was the No. 2 issue, behind women’s reproductive rights.
As the presidential campaign marches into the fall, activists and operatives alike hope Harris does just that, building on her momentum. Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville made a similar case to NOTUS this summer.
“Act like you know the problem is: ‘Too many lonely losers have access to too many guns, and that should be the basis for our policy,’” Carville said.
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS. Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.