OPINION:
Vice President Kamala Harris has pushed back hard on claims that she wants to take people’s guns away by repeatedly saying that she and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz own guns.
It sounds reassuring, but it doesn’t align with past statements. Gone are the Democratic nominee’s emphatic assertions from her previous presidential campaign, in which she said, “I support a mandatory buyback program.”
When asked whether she agreed with President Biden that she couldn’t ban assault weapons with an executive order, Ms. Harris said, “Hey, Joe, rather than saying no, we can’t, let’s say yes, we can.” It wasn’t just that she took this position, but also the enthusiasm with which she did so.
Ms. Harris has championed gun control for years. As San Francisco district attorney, she said, “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.”
It seems Ms. Harris believes that gun ownership voids privacy rights and eliminates the need for consent to searches.
Ms. Harris asserted the constitutionality of banning all handguns in a 2008 amicus brief she filed with the Supreme Court. She even argued that no individual right to self-defense exists.
Mr. Biden is the most activist president we’ve had on gun control, shutting down thousands of gun dealers by mid-2022 due to minor paperwork errors. The president renewed former President Barack Obama’s Operation Choke Point to cut off financial resources for gun manufacturers and dealers.
The companies that remained had to grapple with increased costs. The Biden administration has also established a national gun registry.
Should Ms. Harris become president, she looks destined to escalate these restrictions even further. Ms. Harris oversees the new Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which coordinates the administration’s gun control initiatives. The office oversaw a recently released Surgeon General report that does not mention any benefits of gun ownership.
This office was instrumental in implementing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, introducing complex rules that classify many gun owners as firearms dealers. If you sell a gun to a friend once and discuss selling a second one to anyone, you must be a licensed dealer. You must also be licensed if you sell one gun and keep a transaction record.
Previously, the federal government classified individuals as “gun dealers” if they sold guns “with the principal objective of livelihood and profit.” The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act merely requires that sellers “predominantly earn a profit.”
Many of the act’s rules are vague, giving the government discretion to arbitrarily label individuals as dealers.
Under Ms. Harris, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention has pushed to:
• Eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability
• Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines
• Mandate that individuals lock up their guns
• Require background checks on all gun transfers
By early 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had developed a digital database containing nearly 1 billion gun transactions. To obtain more comprehensive data, Democrats such as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pressured credit card companies to track gun purchases.
Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky discovered that Bank of America had provided the FBI with credit card data for gun purchases without an FBI warrant or probable cause.
With a national gun registry in place, officials can easily identify legal gun owners. As president, Ms. Harris could use this if she ever tries to walk into homes and confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens.
Outside of the presidential debate, gun control had already taken center stage in Ms. Harris’ campaign. She made gun control a key topic in her first event in Wisconsin and at a gathering of the American Federation of Teachers. In front of the teachers, Ms. Harris vowed to ensure that no educators would carry guns in schools.
Twenty states already permit teachers to carry concealed handguns. Notably, there have been no mass shootings in schools that allow concealed carry. There haven’t even been any gun attacks that resulted in death or injury.
Through a national registration system that enables gun confiscation and through regulations that will put gun manufacturers and sellers out of business, Ms. Harris is working to eliminate legal gun ownership in America.
The Supreme Court may be the last bulwark against this radical agenda, but perhaps not for much longer if a Democratic president has the chance to replace one or two justices. That is a real possibility, since Justice Clarence Thomas will turn 80 and Justice Samuel A. Alito will be 78 by the end of the next presidential term.
Ms. Harris may make sure she gets to own a gun, but that doesn’t mean she wants you to exercise that right.
• John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice.
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