At The Federalist: If Elected, Kamala Harris Would Be The Most Anti-Gun President In U.S. History
Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at The Federalist.
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Biden is the most activist president ever on gun control, putting thousands of gun dealers out of business by the middle of last year for trivial paperwork mistakes. He used government regulations to “debank” gun makers and dealers, and those that survived were faced with higher costs. The Biden administration has also put together a national gun registry. But a President Kamala Harris will be even worse for gun ownership.
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During the 2020 presidential campaign, Harris ran to the left of Biden on gun control. While both supported an assault weapon ban, Harris wanted to force gun owners to sell to the government any firearms that she deemed undesirable. Harris went farther than Biden in vowing to use executive orders if Congress did not pass the ban.
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Harris pushed for gun control this week in her first campaign speech as the presumptive Democratic nominee. And she has a long history of pushing for gun control. In early 2008, Harris argued for the constitutionality of gun bans in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. She claimed that there was no individual right to self-defense.
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Harris is the Biden administration’s “gun control czar,” overseeing the administration’s gun control effort through the White House’s new Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP), which coordinates the administration’s gun control efforts. The administration has just put out a report failing to recognize any benefits from people owning guns.
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The office is credited with helping to implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which introduces long and extremely complicated rules that will result in many gun owners being defined as firearms dealers. If you sell a friend a gun once and discuss the sale of a second gun, you must be a licensed dealer. Similarly, if you sell one gun and keep any record of what you bought and sold it for, you must also be a licensed dealer. But other rules are vague and give the government discretion to classify you as a dealer when it sees fit.
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Under Harris’s direction, the OGVP is calling to:
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— Eliminate “gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability”
— Ban “assault weapons and high-capacity magazines”
— Mandate that people lock up their guns
— Impose background checks for all gun transfers
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Take just the first proposal, which will make gun manufacturers civilly liable for the misuse of guns they sell. This would mean that people can sue manufacturers and sellers whenever a crime, accident, or suicide occurs with a firearm. The straightforward result would be to put gun makers out of business.
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Imagine what would happen if such liability applied to the car industry. The National Safety Council estimates that 46,027 Americans died and 5.2 million others were injured from car accidents in 2022. People can also use cars to commit crimes.
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Note that gunmakers can be sued for product malfunctions and sellers are liable for illegal firearms sales (such as for not running a background check) are already covered; to run afoul of this proposed rule, product makers need not do anything wrong. Car accidents often occur when a driver isn’t paying attention or drives recklessly, perhaps under the influence. It would be ludicrous to make car makers pay lost wages, medical costs, and pain and suffering because of a driver’s negligence.
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Gun-control advocates sometimes claim that gun makers cater to the criminal market with low prices and easy concealability. But lightweight, compact firearms also make life easier for the 21.8 million Americanswith concealed handgun permits and the millions more in Constitutional Carry states who carry without a permit. Women generally prefer smaller, lightweight guns. If my research shows me anything, the people who benefit the most from carrying concealed handguns are the most likely victims of crime – poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas. Making guns more expensive prevents some of those people from being able to defend themselves.
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My research finds increases in gun ownership are associated with drops in crime, not rises. Poor people in the areas with the highest crime rates benefit the most from owning guns, according to my studies. But gun-maker liability would be sure to make guns unaffordable for them. Police also believe gun ownership helps to combat crime: When PoliceOne, the largest organization of police with 450,000 members, surveyed its members, around 76% answered that legally armed citizens are very or extremely important in reducing crime.
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Or take the rules on mandating gunlocks. According to my research on gunlock mandates, published in the Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, and elsewhere, requiring individuals to lock up their guns in certain states made it more difficult for those people to defend their families successfully. Such laws emboldened criminals to attack more people in their homes; there were 300 more total murders and 4,000 more rapes occurring each year in the states with these laws. Burglaries also rose dramatically.
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Indeed, that is not particularly surprising, given that crime rises when we impede people from protecting themselves. Indeed, every place in the world that has banned guns has seen an increase in murder.
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Beyond all that, Democrats will have appointed almost 70 percent of the Circuit and District court judges by the end of this year, with many refusing to follow the Supreme Court’s lead on the Second Amendment. And by the end of the next presidential term, Clarence Thomas will be 80, and Sam Alito will be 78. If Harris replaces one or both individuals, you will have a very different Supreme Court.
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Gun control will be a major focus of Harris’ campaign. In her first campaign event in Wisconsin on Monday and again when she spoke to the American Federation of Teachers on Thursday, gun control was a major topic. Before the teachers she promised to ensure that no teachers would be able to carry guns at schools. Twenty states already allow teachers to carry concealed handguns. In Utah and New Hampshire, any teacher with a concealed handgun permit can carry. In other states, it is up to school boards or superintendents to decide. And there have been no mass shootings, indeed no attacks where anyone has been injured or killed, under that policy.
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Whether it is a national registration system that allows Democrats to confiscate guns or regulations that will put gun makers and sellers out of business, Kamala Harris is working to eliminate legal gun ownership in America.
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