A Kamala Harris presidency would be an absolute nightmare for gun owners. Not only would she continue the abusive policies of the Biden era, in which the ATF has routinely overstepped its authority and promulgated new gun control laws in the guise of agency rules, she’d be in a position to reshape the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary to undo or overturn the Heller, McDonald, and Bruen decisions; not to mention her support for a ban on modern sporting rifles, a federal “red flag” law, and the demise of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, has promised a hands-off policy when it comes to our Second Amendment rights and has pledged to get tough on criminals, not lawful gun owners. But even a “law-and-order” approach to public safety can infringe on our rights, and Trump’s embrace of “stop-and-frisk” policies is a yuge mistake, in my opinion.
Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher disingenuously frames Trump’s comments as support for “gun confiscation”, even though it’s pretty clear that the former president was talking about taking guns from people who possessed them illegally when he spoke to Fox & Friends on Thursday morning.
JONES: What would you do different, Mr. President? What would you do differently though? You see what the Biden administration — are you sending in the National Guard? Are you mobilizing the business? Are you going to change the education system?
Day one if there’s a Donald Trump presidency, what would you do in Chicago?
TRUMP: First of all, you — I know the people in Chicago. I know the police, because I built the building there. I spent a lot of time — the building, it was a — it’s a great building, a really great building.
And what happened is I got to know a lot of people, including the police. You have a great police force in Chicago, just like you do in New York, just like you do in Los Angeles, you have great — they’re not allowed to do their jobs.
You’ve got to let the police do their jobs, number one. Number two, you have to do a policy of stop and frisk. When you see a guy coming down the street and you can — the police know every one of them. They know their middle name. They know where they live. They know every one of them, the local police, and they’re great.
You got to let them do their job, stop and frisk, and take their gun away. You’ve got to do it. If somebody has because they have all these guns — you know, it’s very interesting, the toughest gun law, the toughest, by far, in the whole United States is in Chicago, and yet it’s the most — it’s —
JONES: Most violent, yeah.
There’s no way that police know “every guy coming down the street”. When Trump said that law enforcement “knows every of them”, he wasn’t talking about members of the public. He’s referring to repeat offenders; the small handful of prolific criminals in every community who are responsible for an large number of violent crimes. That’s who he wants police to stop and frisk, and the guns they might take away would be those illegally possessed.
The problem, however, is that a previous conviction isn’t probable cause that a crime is being committed now. And as we’ve seen in cities like New York, “stop-and-frisk” policies tend to result in a lot of stops and a lot of frisks, without a lot of guns being recovered. As Gothamist reported last year, NYPD found a firearm in less than 10% of more than 15,000 searches of pedestrians.
Trump is right to focus on the small number of prolific and repeat offenders as the best way to reduce violent crime, but “stop-and-frisk” isn’t the best policy to target that cohort. Instead, he and his campaign team should take a look at Operation Ceasefire, which offers a truly targeted approach to repeat, violent offenders by offering them a way to turn their lives around or face the utmost consequences of the federal judiciary if they continue to terrorize their neighborhoods. Ceasefire has been proven to reduce shootings and homicides by more than 50%, and without trampling over anyone’s Second or Fourth Amendment rights in the process.
Despite Mediaite’s claim, Trump has not endorsed gun confiscation. But his support for stop-and-frisk is still a mistake, in my opinion, and there are much better strategies available that he can and should get behind.
