With the Democratic National Convention set to kick off in anti-gun Chicago on Monday, some may have questions about just where the party stands on gun rights.
The four-day convention, as detailed on its website, will see delegates, supporters, and party officials rally around Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the Democratic nominees for President and Vice President. While neither Harris nor Walz has announced an official platform headed into the event, the Democratic National Committee last month detailed its party platform draft, in which national-level gun control played a big role, among other progressive issues.
While taking full credit for the ongoing decline in crime numbers that have been dropping since the early 1990s, the platform draft is clear that more gun control is on the agenda, saying, "Democrats will take on common sense solutions to gun violence, including universal background checks, safe storage requirements, and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines."
This gels with public comments made by Harris on July 23 that she planned to "finally pass red flag laws, universal background checks, and an assault weapons ban," once elected.
At Waltz and Harris' first public event in Philadelphia on Aug. 7, Harris vouched for her Veep pick's gun control background before saying, "Together, when we win in November, we are finally going to pass universal background checks, red flag flaws, and an assault weapons ban," leaving little ambiguity.
Pointing to the controversial 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a rushed 32-page law that has been used to try to do everything from cutting funding for hunter's education programs to enacting backdoor universal background checks, the DNC platform draft proudly states that "President Biden and Vice President Harris and Democrats in Congress defeated the gun lobby and passed the first significant federal gun safety law in nearly 30 years."
The DNC doubled down on the anti-gun rhetoric in their final 92-page platform paper, released early Monday, to add repealing PLCAA protections for the gun industry against spurious lawsuits and adding public funds to support gun control regulation and research.
Democrats will establish universal background checks, a step supported by the vast majority of Americans, including gun owners. We will once again ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. We will require safe storage for guns. Democrats will end the gun industry’s immunity from liability, so gunmakers can no longer escape accountability. We will pass a national red flag law to prevent tragedies by keeping weapons out of dangerous hands.
We will increase funding to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) for enforcement and prosecution, and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for firearm background checks. And, because the gun violence epidemic is a public health crisis, we will fund gun violence research across the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as community violence interventions
The Democrat National Convention is set for Aug. 19 to Aug. 22. Spoiler alert: you may see promises of universal background checks, red flag flaws, and a federal "assault weapons ban."
