During Thursday night’s campaign event with Oprah Winfrey, Kamala Harris made her most shameless attempt yet to reinvent herself as a Second Amendment supporter. In an exchange with Winfrey about Harris’s supposed gun ownership, the Democratic candidate laughed while saying, “if somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” before adding, “I probably should not have said that. My staff will deal with that later.”
I have no doubt that Harris and her handlers have been working on that line for awhile now. And it has the benefit of being true: if someone were to break in to the vice president’s home, I’m sure they are going to be shot at; not by Harris, mind you, but by the team of Secret Service agents assigned to protect her.
It’s a different story when it comes to you or me. As we reported this week, in 2007 Harris claimed that law enforcement had the authority to enter locked homes to check and see if guns were stored in compliance with a municipal ordinance in San Francisco, one that was so restrictive it required gun owners to keep their firearms locked up unless they were being carried inside the home. Harris wasn’t interested in ensuring that gun owners could easily access their firearm for self-defense when seconds counted. No, her concern was that the gun storage requirement was being followed, even to the point of violating residents’ Fourth Amendment rights in order to ensure their guns were locked up.
What made Harris’s comment truly bizarre is that it came moments after a highly emotional segment featuring a student from Apalachee High School and her parents that left several folks in the studio audience in tears. In fact, Harris awkwardly pivoted back to the issue of school shootings immediately after she laughed about someone getting shot if they break into her home.
Harris then launched into her standard talking points about her proposed ban on so-called assault weapons, once again falsely claiming that semi-automatic long guns are “weapons of war that don’t belong on the streets of a civil society” while asserting that neither she nor Tim Walz want to “take everybody’s guns away.”
Yet once again, Harris refused to get into the details of her “common sense” proposal to ban the most common rifles in the country, nor did she offer any explanation about why she’s supposedly changed her mind about her call for a mandatory “buyback” of the the tens of millions of modern sporting rifles in the hands of responsible gun owners.
Harris suggested that banning so-called assault weapons would end the threat of school shootings, though a 2019 report on targeted attacks on school campuses revealed that handguns were used twice as often as long guns in these tragic incidents. Even if banning guns in common use for lawful purposes was constitutional or effective at actually removing those firearms from “the streets” (and it’s not), the twisted souls intent on carrying out the mass murder of their classmates and teachers would still be able to do so.
Interestingly, when the father of the Apalachee High School student was asked what he thought should be done to protect students, he brought up using metal detectors at school entrances instead of banning guns. Harris didn’t endorse that idea. Instead, she fumbled around to find her train of thought before using his comments as a way to talk about her own gun control proposals. That’s on brand for Harris, who called for taking police out of schools when she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019.
Though Harris yet again claimed to support the Second Amendment (while calling for a gun ban in the same breath), virtually all of her talking points about protecting kids in school revolve around restricting we the people’s right to keep and bear arms. There was no talk of hardening security, using behavioral threat analysis to identify potential school shooters before they have a chance to act, or improving access to mental health care for troubled adolescents. Harris may have refused to delve into the details of her plan, but she still made it clear that for the Harris/Walz campaign, the path to public safety treads all over the Second Amendment and our fundamental right to keep and bear arms.
