NRA-ILA | Kamala Harris Desperately Running from Her Own Anti-Second Amendment Record

Kamala Harris, the party-installed alternative to Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election, is now squarely in the national spotlight. She and her handlers like to pretend this gives her the opportunity to invent her political persona out of whole cloth so that she can appeal to that decisive section of the American electorate that can be swayed in one direction or another.

In fact, Harris has a long political record, one that is now coming back to haunter her as she tries to portray herself as competent, professional, and middle-of-the-road. And if there’s one issue that has consistently defined her extreme brand of far-left politics, it is contempt for the Second Amendment. Try as she might, she cannot outrun that legacy.

We began delving into Harris’s record on Second Amendment issues last week. This included – during her time as a state and local politician in California — denying that the Second Amendment protects a right to keep and bear arms unrelated to militia service and insisting that it has no bearing on state or local gun control laws. These are not only extreme positions in 2024, after the Supreme Court has authoritatively ruled on these issues to the contrary, they were extreme positions then. A 2008 Gallup poll that showed only 20% of Americans agreed with Harris’s interpretation of the Second Amendment as applying solely to state militias, while 73% did not. In San Francisco, where she was free to be as far-left as she wanted, Harris was perfectly willing to be out of step with mainstream American thought on the Second Amendment.

Later, 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.” This is the term anti-gun Democrats use for America’s most popular rifles, including the AR-15. While clearly agreeable to that idea in principle, even Biden had to admit it was unconstitutional. Yet when asked for her opinion on the matter, Harris laughed in Biden’s face, and quipped: “I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say, yes we can.”

Saying “yes we can” to unconstitutional executive actions to ban and confiscate America’s favorite guns now presents a problem for Harris. Her strategy to deal with that problem? Gaslight and deny it.  

According to the New York Times, a reliable ally of the Democrat 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 strange way to describe letting a person’s own words and professional actions define the person’s values, beliefs, and policy positions.

Even stranger is how the Harris campaign plans to respond to those who bring up what the candidate herself has said and done during her political career, according to that same article: “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.”

It would be one thing for Harris to claim she was wrong then and has since come to her senses and changed her mind. However unconvincing that might be, it would at least in theory be within the realm of possibility.

But Harris and her handlers want to rewrite history itself 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.

There is a term in American law called “declaration against interest.” It is 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 that is clearly contrary to his or her own best interests, it is more likely to be true. Put another way, when people are trying to protect themselves, they lie. But when they think they can talk with impunity, they tell the truth.

In the bubbles of California, San Francisco, and a Democrat primary, where far-left opinions are fashionable and rewarded, Harris could truly speak her mind on guns. Now that she is answerable for those opinions to a wider American audience, she is – right on cue – trying to retreat from them. And, right on cue, her media collaborators are doing their best to help her deny and rewrite the historical record.

America’s gun owners, however, should neither forget nor forgive where Harris has stood on their constitutional right to keep and bear arms. We will have plenty more to say on that record – or, more precisely, we’ll tell you what Harris herself has said –in the weeks to come.