Democratic candidates embrace gun control

WEST ORANGE, N.J /NORTH AVONDALE, Ohio: Aftab Pureval, a Democrat seeking to unseat a Republican congressman in Ohio, knows the political risks in calling for gun restrictions and taking on the powerful National Rifle Association, which has spent more than $115,000 supporting his opponent over the years.

But after a spate of school shootings, including February’s massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Pureval believes voters in the Republican-leaning district have had enough of congressional inaction.

"The leaders that they sent to Washington, DC, to represent them have had their opportunity time and time again and time and time again, they have failed," Pureval, 35, said after a rally with gun-safety activist and former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who suffered brain damage from a gunshot in 2011.

A Reuters analysis shows Pureval is among Democrats in the most competitive US congressional races who have embraced gun control in far greater numbers than in 2016, defying the conventional wisdom that doing so is a losing proposition in close contests.

Thirty-eight of the 59 Democrats backed by the party’s "Red-to-Blue" campaign targeting vulnerable Republican districts have supported gun restrictions in their official platforms, a review of campaign websites shows.

Several others separately released statements calling for limits. At this point in the 2016 election cycle, only four of 36 Red-to-Blue candidates backed gun limits in their platforms, according to a Reuters review of archived campaign websites.

Reuters was unable to examine the websites for two candidates in the program that year. November’s midterm elections will test whether gun violence has become a defining issue for US voters in the wake of the Parkland shooting that killed 17 students and staff and reignited a nationwide movement for stricter gun laws after a campaign by student survivors.

Nearly all the Democrats in the three dozen most competitive races for the US House of Representatives wrote multiple social media posts touting their support for anti-gun legislation and for the student-led protest, according to a Reuters review of their postings.

But many Democrats have modulated their message, avoiding inflammatory terms such as "gun control" and voicing support for basic gun rights with "common-sense" reforms. Political risks remain.

In past cycles, advocates for gun safety struggled to match the might of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the leader of the gun-rights lobby, which views any limits as an assault on the US Constitution.