In 2009 Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, told reporters that the president would like to renew the assault weapon ban.

The response from the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was swift: “Shut the fuck up” about guns. Washington Democrats had decided that gun control was a losing issue.

Nearly eight years later, after a sequence of increasingly deadly, high-profile mass shootings, Hillary Clinton is refusing to stay silent.

She has repeatedly endorsed the assault weapon ban, questioned a key supreme court decision supporting gun rights, and pledged to “tackle the gun lobby” from her very first day in office.

Clinton “didn’t have to make fighting gun violence a centerpiece of her campaign,” Connecticut senator Chris Murphy told the Democratic convention on Wednesday. “Frankly, I’m sure people told her it wasn’t worth the political risk. But she held firm.”

Clinton’s proposed solutions to America’s gun violence problem are not new: she has endorsed more or less the same slate of gun control policies Democrats supported in the 1990s.

On key issues, Clinton’s campaign platform is out of step with major gun control groups, who have chosen to back away from advocating a federal assault weapon ban or from challenging the supreme court’s controversial 2008 ruling that Americans have an individual right to own a gun in the home for self-defense.

Politically, though, Clinton’s choice to champion gun control as a winning Democratic issue has helped reshape a policy debate that Republicans in Congress still refuse to touch.

On Wednesday at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, a series of survivors and family members of victims from four different mass shootings – including a mother whose son was murdered only last month at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando – endorsed Clinton and made emotional appeals for action on tougher gun laws.

“I know common sense gun policies save lives,” said Christine Leinonen, whose 32-year-old son Drew Leinonen was killed alongside his boyfriend in Orlando in June.

“Where was that common sense the day he died? I never want you to ask that question about your child. That’s why I support Hillary Clinton.”

Christine Leinonen, mother of Christopher Leinonen, with Brandon Wolf and Jose Arriagada, survivors of the Orlando attack, at the Democratic convention on Wednesday Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Erica Smegielski, the daughter of the elementary school principal murdered in a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 20 first-graders and six educators dead, compared Clinton to her mother. Dawn Hochsprung was shot to death as she rushed to confront an armed intruder who burst into Sandy Hook elementary school in December 2012.

“What we need is another mother who’s willing to do what’s right, whose bravery can live up in equal measure to my mom’s,” she said.

The night’s focus, a Clinton campaign policy staffer tweeted, was the first time in Democratic convention history that there was a “full feature on the impact of gun violence, and our fight for reform”.

Asked about Clinton’s emphasis on gun control in the 2016 campaign, Jennifer Baker, the director of public affairs for the National Rifle Association’s Institute of Legislative Action, pointed to Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City who has fought for tougher gun laws for a decade, and who spoke in favor of Clinton, and against her Republican rival Donald Trump, on Wednesday.

“Anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg has promised a blank check to politicians who support his extreme gun control agenda,” she said.

As mass shooting victims spoke out for the Democratic nominee, the NRA released an ad Wednesday night attacking Clinton. The ad features Kimberly Corban, a rape survivor and gun rights advocate, who warns viewers: “Self defense is your right. Don’t let it be taken away.” The ad is slated to run on national cable and online in key battleground states starting Thursday.

Since the Orlando shooting, dozens of congressional Democrats have followed Clinton’s lead. In June, they held a historic, 26-hour sit-in on the floor of the House to protest Republicans’ refusal to even allow a vote on gun control bills, and followed it with more protests in their home districts and in Washington. Congressional Democrats are now campaigning on gun control as an issue that could help them win.

That’s a stark contrast to the strategy Democrats pursued for years – the one Clinton’s own husband recommended to his party. Bill Clinton blamed Democrats’ support of gun control for their losses in the 1994 midterm elections – perhaps unfairly, some critics have argued. Some Democrats also blamed support for gun control for Al Gore’s loss in the 2000 election.

As late as 2013, during a private event, Bill Clinton warned Democratic donors about the political costs of gun control, Politico reported.

“Do not be self-congratulatory about how brave you for being for this” support of tougher gun laws, Clinton reportedly said, even as Obama was pushing for new gun legislation after Sandy Hook. “The only brave people are the people who are going to lose their jobs if they vote with you.”

On Wednesday, one of the leaders of the firearm industry’s trade association questioned whether Hillary Clinton’s gun control agenda would pay off, or whether it would backfire, as it did against Gore.

“Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s Larry Keane wrote.

Adam Winkler, a second amendment expert at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, said Democrats’ shift on gun control represented a larger electoral strategy change: instead of trying to woo swing state voters, Democrats are now focusing on turning out their own base.

Winning swing states meant “appealing to especially white, working class swing state voters. That demographic was also strongly in support of gun rights,” Winkler said.

The Democrats’ core constituency, in contrast, seems to welcome full-throated attacks against the gun industry and congressional inaction on guns.

Murphy, the Connecticut senator, received a powerful response from the convention crowd on Wednesday when he talked about the fury and outrage he felt towards Congress for its inaction on gun laws, despite “three years of almost daily bloodshed”.

“Enough! Enough! Enough!” the crowd chanted.

While gun control groups have hailed and endorsed Clinton as the gun safety candidate, the Clinton campaign’s platform does not line up with larger gun control groups on several key policies.

Many national gun control groups have moved away from focusing on an assault weapon ban, arguing that fighting for other gun control policies, particularly background checks, are more likely to save more lives.

A justice department-funded evaluation of the previous federal assault weapon ban, which expired in 2004, concluded: “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

With the political makeup of the supreme court currently in the balance, Clinton has also come out swinging against the court’s 2008 Heller decision, which struck down the District of Columbia’s handgun ban and ruled that Americans have an individual right to gun ownership for self defense.



In May, Clinton’s campaign said she believed Heller was “wrongly decided”.

Hillary Clinton looks on during a a panel discussion with families of victims of gun violence in Connecticut in April. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Some gun control advocates have welcomed this strategy. But two of the largest gun control groups, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Bloomberg-backed Everytown for Gun Safety, both said that the Heller decision was completely compatible with the gun legislation they supported.

“Calling for Heller to be overturned is a sign, in some ways, that [Clinton] is out o touch with the majority of gun control organizations,” Winkler said. Both the gun control movement and Democrats “by and large have come to term with the fact that people have the right to have firearms.”

At the same time, the Clinton campaign’s policy list does not include the newer, criminal justice-focused approaches to gun violence prevention that several gun control groups have endorsed in recent months.

This slate of alternative strategies – including hiring former gang members as local “violence interrupters”, using outreach workers in hospital trauma centers to help shooting victims change their lives, and the Boston Ceasefire model, which coordinates police officers, prosecutors, social workers and community members to put targeted pressure on the small groups of men driving neighborhood gun violence – all focus more on the people doing the shooting than the guns they use.

Clinton’s platform is “woefully insufficient and incomplete”, said Michael McBride, a California pastor who leads Live Free, a gun violence prevention and criminal justice reform campaign that has repeatedly pressed Democrats, including Obama, to embrace a wider range of gun violence prevention strategies.

“While it’s necessary to keep pushing for universal background checks, there are no targeted approaches to addressing the immediate scourge of gun-related homicides in urban communities,” he wrote.

Whether Clinton will be able to deliver on her more traditional gun control agenda, if she is elected, remains unclear – and, if the House of Representatives remains in Republican hands, unlikely.

It’s more likely that federal gun laws would change if Trump is elected, Winkler said. “Probably the only significant gun laws that would come out of the 2016 election is one that expands gun rights, not one that limits them,” he said.

