President Joe Biden is set to travel to Connecticut Friday to speak on one of the key issues uniting his ideologically and demographically diverse coalition: gun control .

Bidens speech Friday at the National Safer Communities Summit in Hartford, organized by leading gun control groups, is not officially a campaign event. However, it comes as Biden is launching the most intense period of political activity since announcing he would run for reelection in April, one day before the first official rally of his reelection bid.

A central problem facing Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris reelection bid is simple: Their coalition includes everyone from moderate baby boomers in the suburbs to progressive college students in city cores, anchored by Black and Latino voters throughout the country. Gun control is a key issue gluing those disparate groups together.

Just within the past year and change, mass shootings have killed people in white Midwestern communities , West Coast Asian communities and Northeast urban Black communities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 49,000 Americans died by gun violence in 2021, the most recent year for which numbers are available. And as the count of gun fatalities rise, so does American willingness to engage it as a political issue.

It can impact anybody. No one is safe anymore, said Celinda Lake, the president of Lake Research Partners, a national public opinion and Democratic political strategy research group that worked with the Biden campaign in 2020. Whether youre talking about your church, your workplace, your grocery store, your kids school.

She said the broad and growing impact of gun violence means it has a cross-spectrum appeal as a political issue.

Gun violence is becoming a great equalizer, Lake said. Gun suicides in rural America, community violence in urban areas and mass shootings in public places are indiscriminate in who they injure or kill. Theres just a sense that there is a broad reach now of all kinds of people in all kinds of circumstances, she added.