On Wednesday March 24, Vice President Kamala Harris sat for a segment with “CBS This Morning” in which she advocated for a raft of gun control measures. During her anti-gun rant, the former senator from California tried to give the impression that anti-gun politicians are not interested in taking Americans’ firearms, stating, “Stop pushing the false choice that this means everybody's trying to come after your guns. That is not what we're talking about.” The statement was a flagrant falsehood, uttered by a person who spent much of the 2020 Democratic primary campaign advocating for the confiscation of commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms among a field of other candidates advocating for the confiscation of commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms.
On September 6, 2019, Harris told reporters in Londonderry, N.H. that she supported a forced “buyback” of commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms – whereby current owners would be required to hand over their lawfully-possessed guns for set compensation. Billionaire gun control financier Michael Bloomberg’s eponymous news outlet cheerfully reported that Harris stated, “I think it’s a good idea,” adding, “We have to work out the details -- there are a lot of details -- but I do…We have to take those guns off the streets.”
On the September 16, 2019 edition of the “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” Harris reiterated her support for gun confiscation. During a question and answer session, an audience member asked Harris “Do you believe in the mandatory buyback of quote-unquote assault weapons and whether or not you do, how does that idea not go against fundamentally the Second Amendment?”
The candidate responded “I do believe that we need to do buybacks.” Making clear that she believes Americans’ Second Amendment rights are for sale, the senator added “A buyback program is a good idea. Now we need to do it the right way. And part of that has to be, you know, buy back and give people their value, the financial value.”
Further demonstrating her commitment to gun confiscation, Harris called for a “mandatory buyback program” during an October 3, 2019 MSNBC gun control forum. Harris told those gathered, “We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program.”
A month later, Harris reiterated her support for gun confiscation to NBC Nightly News. When asked about the specifics of her confiscation program, Harris responded, “well what we’ll do is have an incentive for people to turn them in.”
Harris isn’t the only politician in recent years to make clear that they are in fact “trying to come after your guns.” Rather, overt calls for gun confiscation have become an obvious fixture of gun control politics.
During the second term of his presidency, Barack Obama repeatedly cited Australia’s confiscatory gun control measures when advocating for new U.S. gun controls. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton followed suit, expressing her support for Australia-style gun confiscation.
The campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination was replete calls for gun confiscation. In May 2019, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) expressed his support for gun confiscation to CNN, explaining, “We should have a law that bans these weapons and we should have a reasonable period in which people can turn in these weapons.” During the September 12, 2019 Democratic debate, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was asked about his proposal to confiscate commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms. The former manny responded in part by saying, “hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15.” In November 2018, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) famously suggested that nuclear weapons would make short work of those who might resist his gun confiscation program.
Then there is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who just introduced a new version of her bill to ban commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms and standard capacity magazines – S.736. Discussing her 1994 semi-auto ban – which sunset in 2004 – with CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 1995, the senator lamented the fact that she was unable to secure the votes to confiscate existing semi-automatic firearms. The former mayor of San Francisco stated, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it.”
Perhaps the reason so many gun owners believe that politicians are “trying to come after” their guns is that so many politicians are on the record advocating gun confiscation. NRA members and other gun rights supporters should work to inform others of these politicians’ gun confiscation agenda and to expose Harris’s shameless dishonesty.
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