Elizabeth Warren keeps rising in the polls, despite her image as an elitist East Coast policy wonk determined to glaze your eyes with ponderous professorial lectures about her unhinged socialist agenda. Maybe it’s because the woman actually greeting audiences is nothing like the caricature.

Last week’s 2020 Gun Safety Forum in Las Vegas, organized by March for Our Lives and former congresswoman Gabby Giffords’s eponymous organization, provided an excellent opportunity to observe nine of the top 10 Democratic contenders competing on the same turf, on the same topic. Each candidate had 30 minutes to lay out her or his case in a conversational format with MSNBC’s Craig Melvin, which was far more effective than the networks’ go-to debate or town hall formats. (Bernie Sanders bowed out after suffering a heart attack.)

Warren wowed the crowd, gracefully breaking down the challenges facing gun-reform advocates in a way even I found illuminating, despite having covered America’s gun-violence epidemic for 20 years. She came off like a friendly, unassuming neighbor from the prairie, and it was easy to imagine her waiting tables at her aunt’s restaurant in Oklahoma City when she was 13. With infectious enthusiasm, Warren crystallized one complex idea after another in the simplest terms, illustrating them with concise but convincing examples.

A crucial demand of gun reformers is restoring federal funding for gun-safety research. (Yes, the NRA really coaxed Congress and President Bill Clinton to virtually ban it 23 years ago.) The issue gets almost zero press, because it feels so amorphous and academic—something for professors to bicker about. I confess to rarely mentioning it in my work, because it arouses no one. But Warren put it in tangible, immediate terms: the need for safety locks on firearms. Funding for basic research has set us back 20 years on that sort of breakthrough technology, she said: “Safety locks that may mean that guns work, and work effectively, but only for the person they’ve been licensed to—not for a kid who stumbles across it and wants to check out what it is, or for someone who steals it and wants to use it in the commission of a crime.”

More stunning was the contrast with the lovable candidate who followed her onstage, Joe Biden. He was enthusiastically received, but over the course of his 30 minutes you could feel the air hissing out of the balloon. Congresswoman Giffords lobbed him a layup from the audience, and he dribbled the ball all over the court. “Gun violence is now a kitchen-table issue for millions,” she said. “How do you talk about gun violence at your kitchen table?”

Biden fumbled through a hundred-word preamble thanking her and disclosing he was friends with her, backtracking several times, before finally addressing her question: “You started the notion of talking about it like you said at the kitchen—the way I talk to my grandchildren about it. My two granddaughters are—I have four granddaughters for dinner last night at my house in Delaware. My fifth granddaughter, excuse me—yes, I had three granddaughters, my fourth one. I have five grandchildren. My oldest one couldn’t get down from New York. She’s at Columbia Law School but my two college girls and my one high school girl who lives near me in Delaware, we all sat down and we talked about this. They talk about it and they ask me, ‘Pop, well how can we do some of these things?’ Well, first of all…”

Nearly a minute and a half into his answer, he was about to reach his big point: that kids are afraid to go to school—news to no parent in America, but particularly not this crowd of shooting survivors and gun-reform activists.