At a town hall event on October 21 in Royal Oak, Michigan, Democrat presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris was asked how she would make “impactful and immediate progress around gun violence” if she was elected with a Republican majority in Congress.
In her by-now classic “word salad” style, Harris responded that she thinks of the issue “through the lens of many experiences,” then touched upon the “direct trauma for those who have been directly affected by gun violence,” and ended up at “the macropoint” – namely, the “false choice” between thinking that one is either in favor of the Second Amendment or that “you want to take everyone’s guns away.” She offered herself as living proof of this “macropoint” because she’s not only a gun owner “in favor of the Second Amendment,” but believes in “assault weapons bans, red flag laws, universal background checks” and other “common sense gun safety laws.”
It was made obvious at the start of the October 21 event that it was tightly scripted. Moderator Maria Shriver told an audience member that only questions that had been “predetermined” would be permitted, with no spontaneous questions from the floor. Even within this forced and stilted setup, Harris fell flat. It took her until the last few seconds of the over five-minute exchange to actually deal with the question. “We need common sense gun safety laws and I will continue, I’ve done it throughout my career, work with all of our colleagues across the aisle and I know that we can make progress,” she said, “but I’m not trying to take anyone’s guns away from them.”
The explanation for Harris’ emphatic new identity as a gun enthusiast and supporter of constitutional freedoms is that she is struggling to put her past under wraps, a past in which she wholeheartedly embraced extreme gun bans and confiscation, and which has now come back to haunt her.
A recent news article alleges that Kamala Harris circa 2006 suggested it would be “great” to ban all gun ownership. Harris, then the district attorney of San Francisco, was speaking at an event where she was asked about guns, carrying guns and gun bans: “Is there any justification for anyone to carry a gun, except for law enforcement? And why not ban them completely in the city?” Harris appeared to agree: “yeah, and it would be great to end world hunger and a couple of other things, too. Are we going to really be able to get rid of people owning and possessing guns? I don’t know. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that right now. So I would not put all my effort into that as being the solution, because I think it’s a long way off.” Notably, this earlier version of Harris didn’t mention her staunch support of the Second Amendment or completely disclaim the idea of gun confiscation – as she does now – but instead, responded that getting rid of people owning guns was not immediately feasible.
In case there’s any doubt as to what Harris meant, it is worth remembering that she was listed as a sponsor of a 2005 ballot measure that banned possessing, distributing or manufacturing handguns in San Francisco, with a mandatory confiscation provision (residents who possessed guns were required to surrender their guns to law enforcement within 90 days of the law’s effective date or face criminal penalties). The measure was invalidated after the NRA and other gun rights groups succeeded in a court challenge.
One could argue that Harris has since evolved in her beliefs and now views the issue through the lens of many experiences. However, as a candidate for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination, Harris repeatedly voiced her support for outlawing and confiscating commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms. A CNN article from that time (Democrats have spent years denying they’ll take people’s guns. Not anymore) noted that until then, Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had made a point of expressing support for the Second Amendment and repudiating the idea of gun confiscation, even as they demanded more gun control. By 2019, with three candidates, including Harris, openly in favor of mandatory gun confiscation, it was “a turning point for Democrats.”
In truth, Harris, like at least one other failed competitor in that race, has now found it expedient to refashion her progressive policies into a more mainstream-friendly “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” In 2019, Democrat presidential candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke famously announced, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47...!,” and then, like Harris, did a complete about-face when his gun-grabbing backfired and proved to be a political liability. In his subsequent run as a gubernatorial candidate in pro-gun Texas, “Hell Yes” Beto dialed it all the way back to, “I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone. What I want to make sure that we do is defend the Second Amendment. ” As it happens, Beto’s attempt to rebrand on guns at the expense of his credibility bombed with voters, and by late 2022, having lost three races in four years, a Texas newspaper speculated that O’Rourke’s political career was over.
As Harris strives to convince America that yep, she’s really okay with people owning and possessing guns, she faces the possibility that even voters who may not find her gun control policies (new or old) a total deal-breaker will nonetheless view her flip-flopping, bet-hedging, question-dodging, and incomprehensible homilies as phoniness, a neglect to master the election issues, and a lack of integrity. A Democratic strategist summarized the problem as no record, no transparent agenda and “no sense of character about her.” There isn’t “anything about her record that is particularly impressive, and … more generally what we are seeing in the polls is that voters are beginning to understand that there is really no there there with Kamala Harris,” he said. “There doesn’t appear to be any overarching argument she can make other than… ‘whatever positions I have taken that are unpopular, I am only too happy to alter to fit the political climate.’”
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