Presidential candidate and senator Kamala Harris revealed that she is a gun owner during an event in Iowa.
“I am a gun owner. And I own a gun for probably the reason that a lot of people do, for personal safety,” the California Democrat said. “I was a former prosecutor.”
Harris described the landscape of the Second Amendment debate as one of a false dichotomy: either you support the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.
“For too long and still today we are being offered a false choice which suggests you’re either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s gun away,” Harris said. She attributed the problem to a “lack of courage” from leaders.
Harris called gun violence a “clear problem in our country” and pushed for “smart gun safety laws — which include universal background checks and a renewal of the assault weapons ban. Period,” she said.
One man’s woman’s “lack of courage” is another man’s woman’s “I don’t want to get voted out of office.” Politicians don’t “act” on gun control because the voters do not want gun control. It’s not a complicated situation. The gun control lobby likes to characterize the NRA as a group of self-actuating gun tyrants, but the NRA has power because it has members and those members vote in enough numbers that they have influence.
California, where Harris was a prosecutor and the secretary of state, has some of the strictest gun laws in America. They do have universal background checks, also known as a ban on private gun sales, and they have basically outlawed the class of made up firearms called “assault weapons.” And yet, gun violence is rising.
We think it’s worthy to note that Violent crime is down nationally. But, California’s firearm homicide rate continues to go up, and this is in spite of the state’s far-reaching anti-gun laws. How exactly, is gun control working? Thus, where is the wisdom in continuing down the same restrictive road? It’s not going to get anyone where they want to go, which is why the push for more emotionally harvested policies are counter-intuitive.
The ineffective assault weapons ban, both in California and nationally, and universal background checks wouldn’t have stopped the Sandy Hook shooter, who Harris chose to name-check at a CNN town hall.
During a January town hall on CNN, Harris shamed those in Congress for not acting after the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary shooting, in which 20 6- and 7-year-old children were killed.
“Here’s what I think. I think that somebody should have required – and this is going to sound very harsh – I think somebody should have required all those members of Congress to go in a room, in a locked room, no press, no one, nobody else, and look at the autopsy photographs of those babies,” Harris said back then. “And then you can vote your conscience. This has become a political issue.”
None of Harris’s “smart gun safety laws” would have prevented the Sandy Hook shooter. He stole the guns he used and he had pistols with him as well as a semi-automatic rifle. The shooter was killing unarmed people, what would the size of his magazines mattered? Alas, it’s just a pretense to take away the freedoms of American citizens and limit their ability to protect themselves.