While this year’s Republican Party platform makes only a passing reference to Second Amendment rights, the platform approved at the Democratic National Convention this week does not mention them at all. But it does include eight references to “gun safety” and a section that brags about the Biden administration’s accomplishments in this area while laying out an agenda of additional firearm restrictions.
That treatment of this subject is similar to the approach that Democrats took in 2016, when their platform mentioned “the rights of responsible gun owners” but did not elucidate the basis of those rights, and in 2020, when the platform did not go even that far. The 2016 platform devoted a paragraph to gun control, which became two paragraphs in 2020 and has now expanded to five. Neither of the two most recent platforms so much as alludes to respect for gun rights.
By contrast, Democrats in 2000 promised to “respect the rights of hunters, sportsmen, and legitimate gun owners.” Four years later, after the gun issue, including Al Gore’s support for banning “assault weapons,” was widely blamed for contributing to George W. Bush’s election, Democrats promised to “protect Americans’ Second Amendment right to own firearms.” The 2008 and 2012 platforms included similar language, in both cases explicitly invoking the Second Amendment, which disappeared in the 2016 platform and now does not even seem like a dim memory for Democrats.
Whatever you make of former President Donald Trump’s evolution on gun rights, which seems to reflect political expendience rather than true conviction, he at least understands the importance of paying lip service to the Second Amendment. The current Democratic Party, by contrast, is intent on pushing gun control without acknowledging any constitutional limits on it.
“When I’m back in the Oval Office, no one will lay a finger on your firearms,” Trump promised at the National Rifle Association’s Great American Outdoor Show Presidential Forum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9. “It’s not going to happen….Even as they turn America into a crime-ridden, gang-infested, terror-filled dumping ground, Joe Biden and his thugs will do everything in their power to confiscate your guns and annihilate your God-given right to self-defense. During my four years, nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield.”
In their platform, the Democrats quote those last four sentences, which they consider damning: “While he ‘did nothing,’ gun violence spiked: Trump oversaw the largest single-year increase in murders in history, including a 35 percent increase in gun murders. He refused to limit the use of high-capacity magazines after a Las Vegas shooter used a dozen 100-round magazines to kill 58 people. And, when confronted with horrific gun violence, he told families to ‘get over it.'”
Hellbound and Down 