The final night of the Democratic National Convention will feature the testimony of gun violence victims and activists seeking more gun-control measures.
Before Vice President Kamala Harris takes the stage, former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head during a campaign event in 2011, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA), who lost her son in 2012 to gun violence, and the “Tennessee Three,” a group of state lawmakers who were expelled from the Tennessee legislature for leading a protest against gun violence following the 2023 Covenant school shooting, will all be speaking at the DNC on Thursday.
“I was here in 2016. … At that time, then-Secretary [Hillary] Clinton was the only presidential candidate ever to explicitly have a full agenda for gun violence prevention as a policy agenda that she was running on,” McBath told NBC News. “Here we are in 2024. It’s so completely different. It is so completely different now. We now are the Davids to the Goliath of the scourge of gun violence in this country.”
Gun violence is among the top issues for Democrats in this election cycle. In the Democrats’ 92-page party platform, five pages are dedicated to how lawmakers intend to improve gun safety, policing, and public safety.
“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 states.
The Biden administration created the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which Harris was put in charge of overseeing.
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The office has worked to see that the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, is being implemented. This 2022 law imposes federal penalties for the straw trafficking of firearms, increases background checks for people under 21, and ensures that people found guilty of domestic violence are barred from purchasing firearms.
In addition to taking the stage at the DNC, McBath will be moderating a discussion between activists and gun violence survivors on how best to tackle gun violence. Those on the panel include Abbey Clements, a second-grade teacher and survivor of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter was killed in a 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
