In her first campaign address since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, Vice President Kamala Harris emphasized her support for new gun restrictions.
On Monday, Harris rallied with Democratic campaign staff in Wilmington, Delaware. She laid out her vision for her own potential presidency, which included a number of new gun-control laws. She described herself and the campaign staffers as “we who believe in the freedom to live safe from gun violence.” Then, she made specific policy promises.
“That’s why we will work to pass universal background checks, Red Flag laws, and an assault weapons ban,” Harris said.
Harris’s speech and promises come after a whirlwind 24 hours where President Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection and endorsed her to take over his campaign. Nearly every prominent Democrat has since lined up behind Harris, and no major challengers to her taking the nomination have yet appeared. Her Monday speech indicates she plans to pursue a very similar gun policy path for the 2024 election that President Biden has been laying out since earlier this year.
The speech did not put Harris on a new course for guns. At least, not at this point.
However, Harris ran to the left of Biden on guns during the 2020 primary. They both opposed the Supreme Court’s landmark finding in 2008’s Heller decision that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, but Harris actually signed on to a brief opposing the suit as California Attorney General. While they both backed a so-called assault weapons ban and buyback, Harris went further by advocating for owners to be forced to sell their firearms to the government. The two also clashed over the use of executive power to implement new gun restrictions.
“Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress a hundred days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws,” Harris said during an April 2019 CNN town hall. “If they fail to do it, then I will take executive action.”
“You have no constitutional authority to issue that executive order, the ones they’re talking about. ‘I’m going to eliminate assault weapons’ — can’t do it by executive order any more than Trump can do the things he’s saying he can do by executive order,” Biden responded in an August 2019 press conference.
The Biden Administration has used executive rulemaking to ban some firearms and accessories but hasn’t tried to ban AR-15s or other guns typically affected by “assault weapons” bans using federal rulemaking as Harris suggested. That’s something that could change in a potential Harris Administration.
Still, Harris making gun policy promises in her debut campaign speech contrasts with the Trump campaign’s recent approach to the issue. Republicans unceremoniously dropped all of the previous gun policy promises from their platform in the lead-up to the Republican National Convention and didn’t schedule a single speaker from any of the gun-rights groups. Former President Trump then capped off the proceedings by avoiding all mention of gun policy or the Second Amendment in his lengthy acceptance speech.
That may signal Democrats plan to put more of an emphasis on guns than Republicans do as election day draws nearer.
