At the Washington Times: Kamala Harris may own a gun, but she doesn’t want you to
Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at The Washington Times.
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Vice President Kamala Harris has pushed back hard on claims that she wants to take people’s guns away by repeatedly saying that she and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz own guns.
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It sounds reassuring, but it doesn’t align with past statements. Gone are Harris’s emphatic assertions from her 2020 presidential campaign, in which she claimed, “I support a mandatory buyback program.” When asked whether she agreed with Joe Biden that she couldn’t ban assault weapons with an executive order, Harris said, “Hey, Joe, rather than saying no, we can’t, let’s say yes, we can.” It wasn’t just that she took this position, but also the enthusiasm with which she did so.
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Harris has vigorously championed gun control for years. As San Francisco’s District Attorney, she stated,“Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible.” Harris, it seems, believes that gun ownership voids privacy rights and eliminates the need for consent to searches.
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Harris asserted the constitutionality of completely banning all handguns in a 2008 amicus brief she filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. She even claimed that no individual right to self-defense exists.
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Biden is the most activist president we’ve had on gun control, shutting down thousands of gun dealers by mid-2022 due to minor paperwork errors. The President renewed Obama’s Operation Choke Point to cut off financial resources for gun manufacturers and dealers. The companies that remained had to grapple with increased costs. The Biden administration has also established a national gun registry.
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Should Kamala Harris become President, she looks destined to escalate these restrictions even further. The new Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP) is “overseen” by Harris, which coordinates the administration’s gun control initiatives. The office oversaw a recently released U.S. Surgeon General reportthat fails to mention any benefits of gun ownership.
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The OGVP was instrumental in implementing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), introducing complex rules that classify many gun owners as firearms dealers. If you sell a gun to a friend once and discuss selling a second one to anyone, you must be a licensed dealer. If you sell one gun and keep a record of the transaction, you are also required to be licensed.
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Previously, the federal government classified individuals as “gun dealers” if they sold guns “with the principal objective of livelihood and profit.” Now, the BCSA merely requires that sellers “predominantly earn a profit.”
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Many BCSA rules are vague, giving the government discretion to arbitrarily label individuals as dealers.
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Under Harris’s leadership, the OGVP pushed to:
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— Eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability
— Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines
— Mandate that individuals securely lock up their guns
— Require background checks on all gun transfers
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By early 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATF) had developed a digital database containing nearly a billion firearms transactions. To obtain more comprehensive data, Democrats such as New York Governor Kathy Hochul pressured credit card companies to track firearm purchases.
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U.S. Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) discovered that Bank of America has provided the FBI with credit card data for firearms purchases. This was done without the FBI even providing a warrant or probable cause.
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With a national gun registry in place, officials can now easily identify legal gun owners. A president Harris could use this if she ever tries to “walk into” homes and confiscate firearms from law-abiding citizens.
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Outside of the presidential debate, gun control has already taken center stage in Harris’s campaign. Harris made gun control a key topic in her first event in Wisconsin and again at a gathering of the American Federation of Teachers. In front of the teachers, Harris vowed to ensure that no educators would carry guns in schools.
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Twenty states already permit teachers to carry concealed handguns. Notably, there have been no mass shootings in schools that allow concealed carry. Indeed, there haven’t even been any gun attacks that resulted in death or injury.
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Through a national registration system that enables gun confiscation and through regulations that will put gun makers and sellers out of business, Kamala Harris is actively working to eliminate legal gun ownership in America. The Supreme Court may be the last bulwark against this radical agenda, but perhaps not for much longer if a Democratic president has the chance to replace one or two justices. And that is a real possibility since Clarence Thomas will turn 80 and Sam Alito reach 78 by the end of the next presidential term.
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Kamala Harris may make sure that she gets to own a gun, but that doesn’t mean that she wants you to share in that right.
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