Kamala Harris Can’t Run from Her Anti-Second Amendment Record

 

Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s chosen alternative to Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election, is now in the national spotlight. Her team seems to believe this is her chance to reinvent her political persona to appeal to that crucial, undecided segment of the American electorate. But Harris can’t escape her past, a past marked by a long political record that’s now coming back to haunt her. One issue that has consistently defined her extreme brand of far-left politics is her disdain for the Second Amendment. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot outrun that legacy.

Last week, we began examining Harris’s record on Second Amendment issues. During her time as a state and local politician in California, she denied that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms unrelated to militia service and insisted that it doesn’t impact state or local gun control laws. These positions were extreme then, and they’re extreme now, especially after the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise. A 2008 Gallup poll showed only 20% of Americans agreed with Harris’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, while 73% did not. In San Francisco, where leftist ideology reigns supreme, Harris had no qualms about being out of step with mainstream American thought on the Second Amendment.

As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Harris even mocked Joe Biden’s reluctance to use executive authority to “eliminate” so-called “assault weapons”—a term anti-gun Democrats use for America’s most popular rifles, including the AR-15. While Biden, recognizing the unconstitutionality of such actions, refrained, Harris laughed in his face and quipped, “I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say, yes we can.”

Harris’s advocacy for unconstitutional executive actions to ban and confiscate America’s favorite guns is now a major problem for her. Her strategy to deal with this problem? Gaslight and deny it. According to the New York Times, a reliable ally of the Democratic Party, “video clips of [Kamala Harris’s] old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”

“Weaponization” is a strange way to describe letting a person’s own words and professional actions define their values, beliefs, and policy positions. Even stranger is how the Harris campaign plans to respond to those who highlight her past statements and actions: “The Harris campaign will rebut most of Republicans’ attacks by arguing that they are exaggerating or lying about her record,” said a campaign official briefed on the plans who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Harris could have claimed she was wrong then and has since changed her mind. However unconvincing that might be, it would at least be plausible. But Harris and her handlers want to rewrite history to deny the positions she took, the things she said, and their necessary implications.

So who are you going to believe? Kamala Harris then, or Kamala Harris now? What you cannot believe, so we are told, is your own ears and eyes.

In American law, there’s a term called “declaration against interest.” It’s used when judging the reliability of a statement by a person who is not available in court to answer for his or her own words. This principle holds that when a person says something clearly contrary to his or her own best interests, it’s more likely to be true. Put another way, people lie to protect themselves but tell the truth when they think they can speak with impunity.

In the liberal bubbles of California, San Francisco, and a Democratic primary, where far-left opinions are fashionable and rewarded, Harris could speak her mind on guns. Now that she’s answerable to a wider American audience, she’s trying to retreat from those opinions. And, predictably, her media collaborators are doing their best to help her deny and rewrite the historical record.

America’s gun owners should neither forget nor forgive Harris’s stance on their constitutional right to keep and bear arms. We’ll have plenty more to say on her record—in her own words—in the weeks to come.