By David Harsanyi
Monday, August 17, 2020
There’s already a concerted gaslighting effort underway
to convince voters that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential
nominee, would never support something as crazy as the confiscation of millions
of firearms.
Take this USA Today factcheck headlined
“Kamala Harris didn’t say she’d send police to take firearms via executive
order.” You may notice the highly narrow specificity of this debunking. It’s a
little game political media like to play — the Associated Press
miraculously ran almost an identical piece on the same day — in which reporters
take a hyperbolic backbencher’s comments or a misleading social-media post — in
this case, a Facebook post that is “gaining traction” — and use it as a
strawman to deceive voters about one of the controversial positions of their
favored politician.
While USA Today is correct that Harris has never
explicitly maintained that she would sign an executive order to “send police”
to break down your door, she is the first person to be on a major presidential
ticket in American history who openly supports gun confiscation. Whether she
promised to implement those plans through legislation or via executive order is
also, at best, opaque, despite factcheckers’ efforts to claim otherwise.
For one thing, USA Today insinuates that Harris,
answering a question at an AFSCME forum in Las Vegas, denied she supported gun
confiscation. I’m sorry, but her answer
to the Washington Examiner’s Kerry Picket — “I’m actually prepared to
take executive action to put in place rules that improve this situation” —
isn’t by any standard a denial. In responding to the question, Harris not only
failed to deny that she supported the confiscation of semi-automatic rifles,
she also didn’t deny that she supported unilaterally creating a national database
of gun owners. Somehow, though, USA Today and the Associated Press
missed the numerous occasions on which Harris promoted her gun confiscation
position. The latter, in fact, claimed that Harris merely backed a “renewal of
the assault weapons ban,” which is factually inaccurate. The assault-weapons
ban of 1994 only applied to weapons manufactured after the date of the law’s
enactment. Harris supports retroactively making guns illegal — and then taking
them through a mandatory buyback program.
The California senator said so unambiguously on
Jimmy Fallon’s show in September 2019. She did so again the next month at
an anti–Second Amendment event hosted by March for Our Lives, where she said,
“We have to have a buyback program and I support a mandatory gun buyback
program. It’s got to be smart. We’ve got to do it the right way but there are
five million [assault weapons] at least, some estimate as many as 10 million,
and we’re going to have to have smart public policy that’s about taking those
off the streets but doing it the right way.”
That event, it should be noted, was billed as a policy a
forum on “gun safety” — the same euphemism Harris used in the primary debate
where she warned that she would circumvent the legislative branch on gun
policy:
Upon being elected, I will give the
United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the courage
to pass reasonable gun safety laws. And if they fail to do it, then I will take
executive action.
So where did USA Today get the idea that Harris’
theoretical “gun safety” executive order would not include in ban on the most
popular rifle in the United States?
Here’s a fact check: Police would almost certainly be
sent to homes of Americans to take guns if a “mandatory buyback” program were
instituted. AR-15s aren’t “on the streets.” They are hardly ever used
in crimes at all. The vast majority of AR-15s are in homes — somewhere
around 15-20 million of them, depending on what arbitrary designation Democrats
use to define “assault weapon.”
The police, incidentally, are already coming to people’s
doors in California, where the state’s evolving restrictions on gun ownership
are impossible for citizens keep up with even when they make a good-faith
effort. These are the restrictions Harris would like to implement nationally.
By implement, I mean compel. A “mandatory buyback” would
mean the police coming to plenty of doors, because in the United States there
will almost certainly be a great pushback against such authoritarianism, even
if Harris could get away with it.
Once the state is permitted to ban guns over their
aesthetics — since AR-15s share the mechanics of many other firearms — it will
almost certainly be empowered to ban any semi-automatic gun. This is the
ultimate goal of these incremental efforts to inhibit and eliminate gun
ownership.
USA Today claims that Harris went out of her way
to warn about conflating lawful gun ownership and illegal gun ownership, saying
that “they are separate and they are different” as if this dispels the notion
that she is a would-be gun grabber. Surely Ella Lee at USA Today
understands that Harris supports efforts which would transform millions of
law-abiding Americans — 99 percent of whom have gone through criminal
background checks and never used their guns in any illicit way — into instant
lawbreakers.
That’s the point. And a misleading Facebook meme doesn’t
change that reality.
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