Harris Wants Your Guns

Back in 2019, when Kamala Harris actually sought to get voters to put her on the Democratic Presidential ballot rather than oopsing her way there in 2024, she had to offer reasons for voter support that extended beyond "Orange Man Bad." She laid out a series of planks that placed her at the leftmost flank of the twenty-seven aspirants. This aligned with her voting record as a Senator, which places her well to the left of almost all her colleagues.

Unable to find votes with such positions as eliminating private health insurance, she weather-vaned as best she could in pursuit of some traction, but ultimately dropped out two months before the first primary voters even had a chance to put an opinion to paper. Voters weren't buying what Harris was selling.

Here she is, today, an accidental candidate for President. The result of what Joe Biden proudly declared during the 2020 campaign was a DEI selection:

If I’m elected President, my cabinet and my administration will look like the country, and I commit that I will in fact pick a woman to be Vice President.

Harris sits on the ballot because Biden's mental decline was outed to the public by a debate he'd have been better off avoiding, because a Democratic Party hit squad that included Nancy Pelosi reportedly saw electoral disaster and pushed Joe off the ticket, and because that same handful of insiders decided to anoint her. We may never know if Biden’s endorsement was organic or puppet-mastered.

Dumb [redacted] luck!

Harris's camp, along with the legacy press, the "fact-check" cabal, and a dogpile of social media content generators, is now working hard to scrub her leftist history and policy proposals from public view.

That includes her decidedly anti-Second-Amendment attitudes.

Back when stating positions rather than simply being not-Trump was part of the process, Harris told us what she would do as President:

We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program. It’s got to be smart, we got to do it the right way. But there are 5 million [assault weapons] at least, some estimate as many as 10 million, and we’re going to have to have smart public policy that’s about taking those off the streets, but doing it the right way.

Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws. And if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action.

And specifically what I will do is put in place a requirement that for anyone who sells more than five guns a year, they are required to do background checks when they sell those guns. I will require that for any gun dealer that breaks the law, the ATF take their license.

She also said that "she would take executive action on her first day as president to ban the importation of assault weapons and expand background checks."

Politifact, which is famously contortionist in its apologetics for the Democrats, in response to Trump's assertion that she supports mandatory gun confiscation, helpfully fills in the blanks on her behalf with "The phrase "gun confiscation" is broad and could lead voters to think that Harris wants to confiscate all guns from law-abiding owners. That’s not what she has said."

Then it reports "she no longer holds that position."

Sure. And I’m the Last King of Scotland.

What Harris and others call "assault weapons" are the most popular rifle formats in the nation. They easily qualify under the Supreme Court's "in common use" test established in the 2008 Heller decision and reaffirmed in the 2022 Bruen ruling, though anti-gun legislators and certain lower courts are still trying their darnedest to find ways to ban those pesky black guns.

A brief aside to note the irony of an intersectional minority political candidate supporting a policy born of racism, and working against a Supreme Court ruling written by one of only three black Supreme Court justices in America’s history.

It may surprise some to learn that those black guns are used in a very small percentage of overall homicides. The FBI doesn't track "assault weapons" apart from other rifles, probably because the definition of "assault weapon" is vague and varies across jurisdictions.

All rifle homicides tally around 4% of all homicides (for the record, I prorated the "firearms, type unknown" across all the known categories in the FBI data). "Assault weapons" represent about 20% of the total number of rifles in the US, which even if we presume that they are used more frequently than other rifles (an assumption I'd not grant), we are still talking about perhaps a couple hundred homicides committed per year by people wielding those nasty, evil devices.

That falls well below the homicides committed with knives (1500 per year), blunt objects such as clubs and hammers (450 per year), or hands/fists/feet (700 per year). Yes, you are several times more likely to be beaten to death by someone's bare hands than to be shot by an assault weapon.

So, why the endless obsession on the Left to ban the most popular form of rifle in America? The previous ban (1994-2004) was shown to have no measurable effect on crime, after all, so it's not a data-driven policy.

Unfortunately, "data-driven" and its cousin "effective" are rarely the basis for legislation in America, especially on things that are considered partisan. Guns and gun rights are very much a province of the Right, and Team Blue voters take it as a matter of faith that what the rest of us call Modern Sporting Rifles are not only the preferred weapon of criminals (they are not) and especially mass shooters (again, they are not), but that they actually make crime worse.

Harris and countless other leftist politicians pander to these incorrect assumptions and exaggerated fears, and propose "look at me" laws that violate Americans' rights without reducing crime. The gag is that, when a particular restriction or prohibition doesn’t make things better, they stack more "common sense" laws on top of the previous ineffective ones, with an unstated end goal of disarming law abiding Americans.

Do not fall for the "Harris no longer wants to take your guns" smokescreens. Once President, she will dare the Court to stop her, and since she's already made it clear she wants to bend the Court to her will, your and my Second Amendment rights will be in great peril should she ascend to the White House.

Gun rights have been making great strides in restoration to what the Second Amendment guaranteed at both the state level (29 of the 50 states now have permitless "Constitutional Carry" doctrines), and in the Supreme Court. Harris et al would overturn all that because they don't trust Americans with liberty.