Vice President Kamala Harris has been taking the position that she can be trusted on guns. Sure, she’ll say, she wants some restrictions, but those are just commonsense ideas about keeping people safe. She doesn’t want to take anyone’s guns away.
That’s been a recurring theme. She wants gun control, but we’re not supposed to worry because she isn’t a threat to our rights.
Which, of course, we know is nonsense. She has favored gun bans. A couple of them. And that’s only part of the issue.
As The Heritage Foundation’s Amy Swearer puts it pretty clearly: Harris shot herself in the foot on guns.
It’s hard to reconcile Vice President Kamala Harris’s friendly overtures to gun owners with the footage that recently emerged of a 2007 press conference in which the then-district attorney of San Francisco said cops could conduct random home inspections to enforce compliance with the city’s new “safe storage” laws.
Yes, really.
She told reporters:
“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.”
This press conference occurred, after all, just one year before she signed onto an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller that defended the district’s complete ban on handgun possession and argued against any constitutional right to own guns in the first place.
Swearer goes on to point out that Harris isn’t someone with no understanding of the law. As the district attorney for San Francisco, she’d have to be intimately familiar with the law, including things like the Fourth Amendment.
That leads to Swearer pondering how, if Harris is willing to just ignore gun owners’ Fourth Amendment rights, what other rights will she brush aside next.
It’s a fair ask, too.
After all, she’s seeking the highest office in the land. If she wins, she’ll swear that she will support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We have a right to ask whether she’ll actually mean it.
But I think we already have an answer.
You see, that’s pretty much what she swore when she took office as DA. That didn’t seem to cause her a moment’s pause when she vowed to violate San Franciscan’s Fourth Amendment rights simply because they exercised their Second Amendment rights.
Rights aren’t like that. They’re not either/or. You have them all and you have them all the time unless removed by due process. Yet Harris tried to pretend they didn’t.
What’s more, it’s not like she hasn’t had time to say something about it. Not a “I was carried away and would never do such a thing.” Not even a “Yeah, I was out of line to even suggest such a thing. I apologize.”
Nothing.
Harris, by ignoring this, is at least implying she still feels this was a viable idea.
That alone is reason enough she should never again hold any public office.
