Sen. Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms are now openly teaming up for the 2026 midterms, but their shared history of championing policies that weakened law enforcement and prioritized criminals over victims should alarm every law-abiding gun owner in Georgia. Ossoff’s consistent votes against funding police and Bottoms’ “reimagining public safety” approach in Atlanta produced predictable results: rising violent crime, emboldened gangs, and neighborhoods where residents felt forced to rely on their own firearms for protection. For the 2A community, this pairing is a reminder that the same politicians who treat the Second Amendment as a political liability are the ones most eager to disarm citizens while simultaneously making streets less safe.
Their records reveal a deeper pattern that extends beyond Atlanta city limits. Bottoms’ tenure saw homicide spikes that outpaced national averages, while Ossoff has opposed measures to keep illegal immigrants with criminal records off American streets—policies that directly affect how many law-abiding Georgians feel they must carry daily. When these two figures now position themselves as the future of Georgia Democrats, they signal continued resistance to any meaningful cooperation with law enforcement and continued skepticism toward the right to keep and bear arms. The 2026 midterms will test whether voters remember who benefited when progressive criminal-justice experiments left ordinary citizens holding the bag—and the gun.
For Second Amendment supporters, the takeaway is straightforward: elections have consequences for both policy and culture. If Ossoff and Bottoms succeed in rebranding their soft-on-crime legacy as compassion, expect renewed pushes for magazine bans, red-flag laws, and restrictions on lawful carry that further tilt the balance away from the citizen and toward the state. The 2A community’s task is to keep reminding voters that the politicians most hostile to armed self-defense are often the same ones whose policies created the conditions making self-defense necessary in the first place.
