There’s an interesting dynamic playing out among Democrats when it comes to pushing gun control as a campaign issue. As I recently pointed out, Virginia Democratic congresswoman Abigail Spanberger completely ignored the issue in her first campaign video announcing her candidacy for governor in 2025, and gun control groups themselves ran campaign ads in the state’s most recent elections that featured as much or more talk about their favored candidate’s position on abortion as anti-gun legislation.

Democrats in purple states and swing districts haven’t backtracked on their support for gun and magazine bans, but they do seem to be downplaying their own anti-2A viewpoints, at least for the moment. At the national level, however, Joe Biden seems intent on making gun control a big issue for Democrats in 2024. As The Hill reports, Biden’s campaign team released a new round of talking points aimed at the prospective candidacy of Donald Trump on Second Amendment issues, including something that hasn’t been a big issue for the White House until now.

In a memo shared first with The Hill titled “Trump’s America in 2025: More Guns, More Shootings, More Deaths,” the Biden campaign cited Trump’s past comments to argue the Republican front-runner would allow more firearms in schools and push for a national concealed carry law. 

“A Donald Trump presidency will mean more guns in schools and more guns in the hands of criminals, all because he thinks being pro-gun makes him look tough,” Biden campaign spokesperson Seth Schuster said in a statement. “But his refusal to stand up to the gun lobby to protect our kids makes him weak and a coward.”

The contents of the memo weren’t shared in their entirety by The Hill, but it’s worth noting that one of the specific policies Biden’s reelection team is highlighting is a national right to carry reciprocity law.

I’m not in the habit of giving advice to the folks who want to disarm me and turn a fundamental right into a privilege to be parceled out by anti-gun bureaucrats, but I strongly encourage Team Biden to keep trying to scare voters about concealed carry. As a new poll from Marquette University recently detailed, the Bruen decision handed down by the Supreme Court last year that recognized the right to bear arms in public is broadly popular with voters… at least excluding Democrats.

While the poll found just 41 percent approval for SCOTUS among survey respondents, voter attitudes towards the Court’s decision in Bruen is much higher. In fact, according to the survey, 67 percent of respondents supported the Bruen decision’s recognition of a right to carry a gun outside the home, with just 33 percent opposed. The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, on the other hand, was supported by 35 percent of respondents with 65 percent opposed.

…

High school graduates approve of Bruen 74-to-27, while post-graduates are in favor 55-to-45 percent. Americans making less than $30,000 a year back Bruen 62-37, but those making more than $100,000 a year are sightly more supportive, with 70 percent agreeing with the decision.

In fact, the only demographic to record majority opposition to Bruen was Democratic voters, but even then the results were far closer than you’d suspect. 48 percent of Democrats surveyed said they actually agreed with the Supreme Court when it comes to bearing arms, with 52 percent opposed.

Overall, support for the Bruen decision was slightly higher than approval of the Court’s decision to recognize same-sex marriage (67-to-65 percent approval), though not quite as high as the support for the Court’s banning the use of race in college admissions or its ruling that federal civil rights statutes protect LGBT workers from on-the-job discrimination.

Even among Democrats right to carry isn’t the political poison Team Biden thinks it is, and for good reason. Before the Bruen decision came down last June there were more than 40 states that had adopted “shall issue” carry laws, and about half the country had already embraced permitless carry. Concealed carry simply isn’t the scary phenomenon that the Biden campaign believes it to be, at least not in the vast majority of states, and I can’t help but wonder if the campaign staffers who drafted this gun control diatribe hail from the few “may issue” states where concealed carry was previously off-limits to the average citizen.

I’m actually glad Biden’s trying to make right-to-carry reciprocity part of his fearmongering because his opposition will only highlight the current absurdity when it comes to concealed carry.

The right to keep and bear arms is the only constitutionally protected right that stops at the border of the state where you reside, and I can’t wait to hear Biden bumble through trying to explain why that should be the case. I don’t give up my First Amendment or my Fourth Amendment rights when I go visit my family in Massachusetts or New Jersey, but somehow my right to keep and bear arms magically disappears once I leave Virginia and cross over into Maryland, and even though I possess a valid Virginia carry license if I dared to bear arms in Boston or Bergen County, New Jersey I could not only face prison time, but my conviction would prevent me from every lawfully exercising my right to keep and bear arms in the future.

A national right-to-carry reciprocity law would go a long way toward solving that constitutional conundrum, and frankly, there shouldn’t be anything partisan about supporting the idea. But if Biden would rather run on a platform of sending people to prison for engaging in a constitutionally protected activity because he refuses to recognize the right in question, Second Amendment groups and individual gun owners will be happy to let the voters know exactly where he stands… and what it could mean for their life and liberty in the future.