Donald Trump isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, in a crowded field of people who are more or less pro-gun, he’s probably going to be near the bottom of my list. There are too many flags for me to completely trust him with my gun rights, the things he’s said and done during his first term of office.
Don’t get me wrong, he did a lot of good things during that time beyond the gun issue, and I know where my vote will be cast, but with the election coming up in just a few days, really, there’s one thing that needs to be said. There really isn’t a choice if you value your right to keep and bear arms.
That’s not just me talking, either. The NRA said as much recently over at America’s 1st Freedom.
Americans understand we face a momentous presidential contest this year. There is little need for my usual warning—no less true for how often it’s been repeated—that this is the most important election of our lifetimes. Each cycle in recent years has seen a sharper divergence on Second Amendment issues between the parties and their candidates. The Republican Party’s platform expressly speaks of the need to “defend … the right to keep and bear arms.” The Democrat Party platform, meanwhile, doesn’t even recognize the Second Amendment’s existence, and instead devotes one of its nine chapters to endorsing end-stage gun control.
If your vision of the future includes the right to keep and bear arms, Donald J. Trump is your only choice for president. Trump is a Second Amendment champion and would create a firewall of executive support and appointments to protect our sacred liberties. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, would escalate the whole-of-government assault she and Joe Biden have perpetrated against America’s gun owners and the firearm industry, regardless of any constitutional constraint on her objectives.
Fortunately, we don’t need a crystal ball to predict what these two alternative futures would look like. We can look to the recent past and the political careers of both candidates.
Kamala Harris, like Donald Trump, ran for president against Joe Biden in 2020. Unlike Donald Trump, however, Harris did not even clear the starting blocks. She suspended her campaign in December 2019, after failing to secure even a single delegate in primary voting.
Yet Harris’ bid was notable for the fact that she attempted to run to the left of Biden on gun control—not an easy task, considering his own fixation on the issue.
One mistake they made, however, was just to focus on her 2019 campaign.
Let’s not forget her famous support of San Francisco’s ill-fated handgun ban. Handguns are the preferred firearm for self-defense for a significant percentage of the law-abiding gun owners in this country, and she backed a plan that would prohibit people from having them. She’s never walked that back in the least. She’s simply pretended it didn’t happen.
Her anti-gun animosity then extended into saying she could violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights to enter their homes without a warrant to make sure firearms were properly stored.
This was all before 2019 and in that time, she’s done absolutely nothing to walk back those positions. She hasn’t with her proposed assault weapon ban either, of course, now sort of pretending that she never proposed any kind of mandatory “buyback” or anything. She knows the media won’t press the issue of course, and she figures she can ignore all of us without serious repercussions.
And, in some ways, she might be right.
But the truth of the matter is that if you want to preserve your right to keep and bear arms, a vote for Kamala Harris is the last thing you want to cast.
Yeah, Trump said some troubling things in the past, including something along the lines of taking guns and doing due process afterward, but that was also in the aftermath of Parkland when a lot of us weren’t exactly rational. Other things can be explained, even if they’re still bothersome.
With Harris, there are no explanations possible. There’s just raw hatred for our constitutionally protected rights.
