With less than a month to go before Election Day, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about Kamala Harris’s lengthy history of gun control activism. Sadly, most of those questions aren’t even being asked during the rare occasions when Harris sits down for an interview.
That streak of softballs continued during Harris’s Q & A with CBS News and ’60 Minutes’ on Monday night. Harris’s supposed reversal of her demand for a “mandatory buyback” of so-called assault weapons never came up, nor was she asked about her claim in 2007 that police could walk into the locked homes of legal gun owners to inspect how their firearms are stored. Instead, we got this:
Bill Whitaker: A hard left turn here. But– you recently surprised people when you said that you are a gun owner and that if someone came into your house–
Vice President Kamala Harris: That was not the first time I’ve– I’ve–
Bill Whitaker: –they would get shot.
Vice President Kamala Harris: –talked about it. That’s not the first time I’ve talked about it.
Bill Whitaker: So what kind of gun do you own, and when and why did you get it?
Vice President Kamala Harris: I have a Glock, and– I’ve had it for quite some time. And– I mean, look, Bill, my background is in law enforcement. And– so there you go.
Bill Whitaker: Have you– ever fired it?
Vice President Kamala Harris: Yes. (laugh) Of course I have. At a shooting range. Yes, of course I have.
And that was it, or at least the only 2A-related questions that made it past the editors.
There were two obvious follow-ups that Whitaker completely ignored. Harris says she’s owned her Glock for “quite some time”. Her campaign has previously stated that she purchased a pistol when she was the District Attorney in San Francisco, so that puts her purchase sometime between 2004 and 2011, when she became California’s Attorney General. We also know that Harris supported a ban on handguns in San Francisco in 2005, and backed Washington, D.C.’s ban on handguns in 2007/2008. So why didn’t Whitaker ask Harris when she bought her pistol, and whether she was actively advocating or supporting bans on handguns at the time?
Tom Knighton is going to get into the second obvious follow-up a little later today here at Bearing Arms, but we also know that the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention is keenly interested in going after Glocks right now. The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed ATF Director Steve Dettelbach and the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention’s Stephanie Feldman seeking information about the Biden administration’s role in Chicago’s lawsuit against the gunmaker, which seeks to ban the sale of Glocks throughout the state of Illinois because they can be illegally converted to full-auto. We’ve also heard from retired ATF deputy assistant director Peter Forcelli that the White House has pushed the ATF to reclassify Glocks as machine guns.
Kamala Harris is supposedly in charge of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, so it seems like a no-brainer to ask Harris if she’s been involved in those efforts or if she believes Glocks (and other semi-automatic handguns) should be regulated under the National Firearms Act.
Instead, Whitaker asked two basic questions that have nothing to do with Harris’s actual gun control policies or philosophies, and failed to tell us anything at all about how her own claims of gun ownership fit with her previous declarations that handguns can be banned and confiscated without violating our Second Amendment rights. CBS News had the opportunity to demand specifics from Harris on her gun control agenda, but Whitaker failed to ask even the most basic policy questions. It was yet another example of the journalistic malpractice we’ve seen from the media when it comes to covering Harris’s campaign, and I’m guessing it won’t be the last between now and Election Day.
