The Democratic Party spends more space talking about gun policy in its 2024 platform than it did in its 2020 effort.
The new platform, released on Monday, spends more than twice as long touting the party’s gun policy accomplishments and advocating for new restrictions than the old one. It attacks Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump’s record on guns. It also names seven specific policy promises should Democrats win control in the 2024 elections.
“All Americans deserve freedom from fear: to be confident that their children will come home safely from the store or the playground, and to know that their loved one will come home safely from their shift policing the streets,” the platform’s section on guns begins.
The Democrats’ doubling down on guns in their platform follows President Joe Biden and, after he dropped out, Vice President Kamala Harris, making gun control a consistent part of their 2024 campaigns. It could foreshadow the issue having a significant presence at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) or in Harris’s nomination acceptance speech this week. The Democrats’ doubling down also stands in stark contrast with their Republican counterparts, who cut all of the specific gun-rights promises from their 2024 platform and kept quiet on the issue during the RNC.
The Democrats’ 2024 platform includes an entire chapter titled “Protecting Communities & Tackling the Scourge of Gun Violence.” In it, the party lays out a stark contrast between two of the candidates in this year’s race. However, likely because the party drafted it in early July, the platform’s contrast isn’t drawn between Trump and Harris. Instead, it’s between Trump and Biden.
“While President Biden has stood up to the gun lobby, Trump is proud of doing their bidding,” the platform said at one point.
“Women deserve a president who has worked his whole life to end violence against women,” it said at another.
Harris is only mentioned once in the chapter on guns.
“President Biden also established the first-ever White House Office of Gun Safety Prevention – led by Vice President Harris – and took nearly 40 gun safety executive actions, including going after dangerous’ ghost guns,'” it said.
The gun policy promises are generalized to the whole party, though.
“Democrats will establish universal background checks, a step supported by the vast majority of Americans, including gun owners,” the platform said. “We will once again ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
The 2024 promises also include requiring “safe storage,” eliminating gun industry liability protections, and a national “Red Flag” law. Democrats also promise to increase funding for the ATF, the FBI background check system, and CDC “gun violence research.” That list mostly replicates the party’s 2020 platform promises, but not completely.
Some of the party’s 2020 gun promises were accomplished when President Biden signed the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which prohibited dating partners convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence charges from owning guns and provided funding for states to adopt their own “Red Flag” laws. The party dropped several other promises without explanation. Those include ending “online sales of guns and ammunition,” closing the “Charleston loophole,” and incentivizing state gun ownership licensing.
The platform also didn’t include support for a mandatory buyback of “assault weapons,” which the Harris campaign walked back her previous support for shortly after she took over the top spot on the 2024 ticket. The DNC did not answer why it didn’t update the platform to reflect Harris becoming the party’s nominee or the policy changes.
Still, the gun policy shifts in the Democratic platform pale in comparison to the transformation seen on the Republican side. While Trump and the party have not walked back support for previous gun-rights promises, they have gone quiet on the issue. After a pre-ample commitment to defending “our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms,” the 2024 Republican platform drops the issue of guns altogether.
That’s a significant departure from the 2016 Republican platform, the party’s last written platform before 2024. In 2016, Republicans dedicated an entire section of the platform to the Second Amendment.
“We support firearm reciprocity legislation to recognize the right of law-abiding Americans to carry firearms to protect themselves and their families in all 50 states,” the 2016 document said. “We support constitutional carry statutes and salute the states that have passed them.”
“We oppose ill-conceived laws that would restrict magazine capacity or ban the sale of the most popular and common modern rifle,” the section continued. “We also oppose any effort to deprive individuals of their right to keep and bear arms without due process of law. We condemn frivolous lawsuits against gun manufacturers and the current Administration’s illegal harassment of firearm dealers. We oppose federal licensing or registration of law-abiding gun owners, registration of ammunition, and restoration of the ill-fated Clinton gun ban.”
Trump, who went from making a slew of gun-rights promises to claiming gun owners don’t vote, followed up the release of the gun-light platform by avoiding the topic of guns in his hour-and-a-half-long RNC acceptance speech. Guns haven’t been a focus of his post-RNC speeches, but he did discuss them in a recent press conference and even attacked Harris on the issue. Polling on the issue has been limited, but Americans put Trump slightly ahead of Harris on who would better handle the issue in a recent Fox News poll.
The DNC will run from Monday through Thursday. It is scheduled to include a panel with speakers from gun-control groups Brady PAC, Giffords, Moms Demand Action, and March for Our Lives on Thursday at 1 pm central time. Kamala Harris is scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination for President a few hours later.
