Key Takeaways
- Biden is ramping up his message on gun safety as the 2024 presidential race heats up.
- Biden has pledged to pass an assault weapons ban if reelected.
- His campaign sees the issue of gun safety as being critical to turnout among young voters, women voters and Latino voters in swing states.
President Joe Biden’s campaign is ramping up its messaging on an issue it sees as being critical to turnout among young voters, women voters and Latino voters in swing states in the run-up to the November election: gun safety.
Biden on Tuesday is set to address the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund’s “Gun Sense University,” an annual conference for gun violence survivors, advocates and volunteers who descend en masse on Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress to support more robust gun safety laws.
The president, who pledged to pass an assault weapons ban if reelected, is expected to draw a sharp distinction between his record on gun safety and that of former President Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee who promised just last month to “roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment” if he wins.
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The event marks two years since Biden signed the first major federal gun safety legislation in decades, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which garnered support across the political spectrum in the wake of the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022.
While the law fell short of achieving Democrats’ long-sought policies related to universal background checks and an assault weapons ban, it did enhance background checks and boost money for mental health programs. And through an executive order earlier this year, Biden tapped a provision in the law to close the so-called “gun show loophole” in which federal background checks were not required for private sales
Gun violence and the role of firearms in society are two of the most politically divisive issues heading into the presidential election: 68% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say gun violence is a very big problem, compared with 27% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, according to polling from the Pew Research Center.
In equal measure, Trump’s supporters say the exact opposite: 86% of Trump supporters say that gun ownership does more to increase safety by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves, and 40% say an increase in the number of firearms in the U.S. is good for society.
As the campaign ratchets up in intensity, Biden plans to put gun safety – an issue he’s long championed – front and center.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who leads the White House’s Office of Gun Violence, has also been focused on the issue. She oversaw a series of events last week to highlight National Gun Violence Prevention Awareness Day, including a meeting with graduating high school students who attended Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in a shooting rampage.
Last month, the Biden campaign marked two years since the school shooting in Uvalde with the release of a 30-second digital ad roasting Trump for his stances on gun control. The video shows an altar memorializing the 19 children and two teachers killed in the 2022 mass shooting as the song “Ave Maria” plays in the background before transitioning to images of Biden and the first lady visiting the school in the aftermath of the shooting.
“Joe Biden expanded background checks and is fighting to ban assault weapons,” text on the screen reads. ”Donald Trump did nothing to keep us safe.”
The ad is part of a seven-figure media buy targeting Latino voters across the battleground states of Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nevada – just the latest effort by the Biden campaign to target Hispanic voters in states where their ballots are expected to play a critical role in determining the outcome of the election.
