Thursday afternoon’s White House event highlighting Joe Biden’s latest executive actions on guns featured so much “malarkey” from the president and Kamala Harris that it’s hard to say what was the most egregious falsehood. Was it Joe Biden’s oft-repeated (and debunked) claim that people couldn’t own cannons at the time of the Founding. Maybe it was Harris’s bogus claim that guns are the leading cause of death for children, which has also been debunked. Biden’s assertion that “if you want to talk about reducing crime and violence in America, you need to talk about guns in America” is also a strong contender, given that we’re seeing significant declines in homicides in most U.S. cities, including those in Constitutional Carry states.
Those were just a few of the falsehoods aired by Biden and Harris, but frankly, if you follow this issue closely you’ve heard them say every one of these lies before. There was at least one new claim uttered by Harris, however: the inclusion of “gun storage” in her list of gun control demands.
Harris typically talks about three policies in her campaign stump speech: after blithely asserting she supports the Second Amendment, she then says she supports an “assault weapon” ban, a “red flag” law, and “universal” background checks. Gun storage doesn’t usually come up in her prepared remarks, but since she mentioned it on Thursday it’s fair to ask whether she still stands by her previous declaration that the government can enter the locked homes of gun owners to inspect how their guns are being stored.
As San Francisco’s district attorney, Kamala Harris told legal gun owners in her community that authorities could “walk into” their homes to inspect whether they were storing their firearms properly under a new law she helped draft.
“We’re going to require responsible behaviors among everybody in the community, and 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 and safe in the way you conduct your affairs,” Harris told a group of reporters in May 2007.
The remarks came during a press conference introducing legislation that Harris helped draft, which sought to impose penalties for gun owners who fail to store their firearms properly at home.
Now, will Harris actually tell us if she still believes the government has the authority to “walk into” the homes of gun owners without a warrant or probable cause that a crime has been committed so they can “check to see if you’re being responsible and safe”? I doubt it. At best we might get a statement from an unnamed campaign staffer claiming that she’s evolved on the issue (without offering an explanation as to what changed her mind).
Harris’s 2007 remarks are just one of many declarations over the years that demonstrate her stated “support” for the Second Amendment is utterly meaningless. According to Harris, who was the top prosecutor in San Francisco at the time of her comment, exercising your Second Amendment rights means giving up your Fourth Amendment right to be secure in your person and property.
As D.A., Harris didn’t have the authority to order the San Francisco police to walk into the homes of legal gun owners to check on their compliance with the city’s gun storage ordinance. As president, however, Harris would be in a position to demand federal law enforcement violate their constitutional oath in service of her anti-gun agenda. Whether or not many federal officers would comply with that order is an open question, but Harris has made it clear that she doesn’t see the Constitution or any of our enumerated civil rights as obstacles when it comes to enacting and enforcing her edicts.
