President Joe Biden has said he supports the Second Amendment, but he doesn’t act like he does. He might have way back when, but over the last handful of decades, there’s been no sign of it.
Over his term of office, he’s done everything he could to erode our gun rights into nothingness. He hasn’t come nearly as close as he’d like, either, but it hasn’t been for lack of trying.
In fact, Joe Biden will go down in history as the most anti-gun president in history.
That is unless Kamala Harris wins.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Harris ran to the left of Biden on gun control. While both supported an assault weapons ban, Harris wanted to force gun owners to sell to the government any firearms that she deemed undesirable. Harris went further than Biden in vowing to use executive orders if Congress did not pass the ban. The national gun registry makes this mandatory gun confiscation more doable.
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 there is no individual right to self-defense.
Harris is the Biden administration’s “gun control czar,” overseeing the administration’s gun control initiatives through the White House’s new Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP), which coordinates the administration’s gun control efforts. The administration has also just put out a report failing to recognize any benefits from people owning guns.
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. As I’ve previously pointed out, 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. Other rules are vague and give the government discretion to classify you as a dealer when it sees fit.
Under Harris’s direction, the OGVP is also calling for:
- “Eliminating gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability”
- “Banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines”
- Mandating that people lock up their guns
- Imposing background checks for all gun transfers
Now, we’ve addressed all of these before, but John Lott, who wrote the above, does it again and does it well. Go and read the whole thing.
The truth is, though, Lott is correct about Harris. If she wins, she’ll likely be far more anti-gun than Biden was. If Democrats get control of Congress, particularly with a veto-proof majority in the Senate, then our gun rights will not emerge from her administration unscathed.
In fact, by the time she gets done, calling them “gun rights” might be technically correct, but they’ll look more like gun privileges.
While she’s walked back her talk of mandatory confiscation of so-called assault weapons, the truth is that someone who wants to pay lipservice to the Second Amendment isn’t even going to consider such a thing. Harris had no such concerns, mostly because there’s no evidence she sees the Second Amendment as anything but a potential impediment.
Luckily, there’s plenty of time to act. We need to get out the vote not just for president but for every down-ballot election as well. It’s imperative that even if Harris does somehow win that she doesn’t have enough allies in Congress to make anything happen to our right to keep and bear arms.
Because that’s on her agenda and we all know it.
