NRA-ILA | Has Harris Clarified Her Stance on Gun Confiscation?

Now deep into her second national campaign, you would think we would have a clear message from Vice President Kamala Harris on where she stands on guns and the Second Amendment. We certainly know where she stands, but that’s not necessarily what she is trying to sell to the public.

Harris, when she first ran for president, tried to distance herself from the field of candidates by trying to prove she was the most anti-gun choice. She didn’t just call for banning the future manufacture and sale of semi-automatic firearms, as all the others did. She took it a step further, and declared she would impose a confiscation scheme for those firearms already owned.

She tried to downplay the idea of government agents taking firearms from American citizens by calling her plan a “mandatory buy-back.” But as we all know, the government cannot buy back something it did not sell, and mandatory means, comply or face the threat of criminal charges.

In other words, confiscation.

Now, however, Harris seems to claim she no longer supports confiscation; just banning. As if banning semi-automatic firearms was not that big a deal, but a “mandatory buy-back” is going too far.

But if she has truly abandoned confiscating semi-automatics after banning them—something we do not believe—she should probably be clear about that, and maybe explain what changed. After all, the first time she ran for president, she was eager to promote confiscation, going so far as to pronounce she would achieve her ban-and-confiscate goal without Congress. She claimed she would do it through executive action.

During a 2019 debate with Joe Biden, when she was still a candidate running for the 2020 Election, Biden tried to explain her executive action plan was not constitutional. When asked to respond, Harris said, “I would just say, ‘hey, Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say, yes we can.’” She delivered the line with her trademark cackle.

We get that she may have dropped talking about her unconstitutional ban-and-confiscate scheme for the last four years. But that doesn’t mean she no longer holds those views. In fact, during a recent CNN interview, when Dana Bash asked about some of the issues on which she appeared to have flip-flopped, Harris made a point of saying several times that her “values have not changed.”

And, during a recent interview on Meet the Press with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Kristen Welker pointed out a number of policy flip-flops Harris has recently claimed to have made, then asked Sanders if this indicated an abandonment of “progressive ideals.”

Sanders responded, perhaps too honestly, “No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she’s trying to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.” This closely mirrors Harris’ own claim that her “values have not changed.”

During the same edition of Meet the Press where Bernie Sanders may have revealed a bit too much, fellow US Senator Raphael Warnock may have committed the same offense. Warnock is a leading voice among Harris campaign surrogates, and he often doesn’t just speak in favor of the current vice president, but seems to act as a proxy for her candidacy. And, when pressed about Harris’ support for gun confiscation, Warnock seemed to imply that it is still something that he (and Harris) support.

With a long history of support for gun confiscation, and an unwillingness by Harris and her surrogates to disclaim pushing confiscation if they win the White House, it’s clear that Harris still supports gun confiscation and is a threat to the rights of all law-abiding gun owners.