Of all the claims the media has made about Kamala Harris, MSNBC’s Alexander Nazaryan may have come up with the single most laughable take this campaign season.
“Kamala Harris knows how to talk about guns,” claims Nazaryan, adding “she should do it more often.” The reporter swooned over Harris’s assertion during her debate with Donald Trump that she’s a gun owner and isn’t going to take everyone’s guns away, and he was thrilled to hear Harris announce that anyone breaking into her home would be shot. He was even impressed by her “convulsing with genuine, unrehearsed laughter” about an intruder getting shot, though if Donald Trump had made a similar comment I’m pretty sure Nazaryan and his MSNBC colleagues would be convulsing with rage and disdain.
What Nazaryan doesn’t seem to understand (or prefers to ignore) is that Harris wasn’t “talking about guns” in those brief asides. She was talking about herself. Harris has never detailed why she supposedly bought a gun when she was a prosecutor. She’s never discussed how often she goes to the range to train with her pistol. And while she claims to support the Second Amendment, she’s never even attempted to explain how that jibes with her support for virtually every gun control scheme that’s been imagined over the past few decades. Nazaryan may be impressed by her bumper sticker slogans and trite talking points, but that says more about him than Harris.
I’m not a gun owner, but I’ve shot for sport in eastern Montana, western Virginia and elsewhere. I’ve spent enough time in the Mountain West to know that guns are as commonplace there as Ford F-150s. Friends and family in the New York area own guns, too. None of them are simplistic rubes of the kind Obama seemed to imagine. Neither is Harris, for that matter.
It’s worth noting that even as she has touted her own gun ownership, Harris has made clear that she supports a ban on assault weapons, a Clinton-era policy that massively reduced mass shootings. Reinstating a ban would do nothing about the thousands of handgun deaths, including suicides, but it would still help. So would background checks, which Harris also supports.
The American people support these measures, too. In fact, we are much closer to a consensus on guns than partisans on either side would have you believe. And that consensus resides where Harris appears to already be: Let’s keep guns legal, but let’s also do what we can to keep guns out of the hands of people who are demonstrably dangerous, abusive or mentally ill.
Except that isn’t where Harris has stood on the Second Amendment for most of her political career. As District Attorney in San Francisco, Harris supported an outright ban on the sale and possession of handguns. She backed Proposition H in 2005; a ballot referendum in San Francisco that would have outlawed handguns and forced existing owners to hand them over to the local government. She backed a ban on gun shows at the Cow Palace, claiming without evidence that the gun show was fueling illegal sales of firearms. She co-signed an amicus brief in 2007 arguing that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect an individual right to keep and bear arms, only bearing arms while serving in a militia. She even declared that law enforcement had the authority to enter the locked homes of legal gun owners to inspect how their firearms are stored.
In 2019, Harris not only called for a ban on so-called assault weapons but said it would be a “good idea” to include a mandatory “buyback” of tens of millions of lawfully owned semi-automatic firearms.
Harris also has a problem with the right to carry, declaring two years ago that the Bruen decision defies “common sense and the Constitution”.
And when Harris does talk about guns, it’s clear she’s either clueless or lying about the law. During an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia last week, Harris claimed that licensed gun sellers don’t have to put buyers through a background check when they’re selling guns at a “flea market”, even though federal law is clear that FFL’s must do a background check on every sale, regardless of where it takes place.
I absolutely agree with Nazaryan that Harris should be talking more about guns, even if we have very different reasons for wanting to hear more from the candidate on the issue. Nazaryan thinks that leaning into her supposed gun ownership would make her a more likable candidate, but I suspect that the more Harris is forced to detail her passionate embrace of gun bans and her desire to criminalize the most basic aspects of our right to keep and bear arms, voters will be repulsed both by the positions she’s taken over the years and her inability to explain what exactly her “support for the Second Amendment” actually means. I have a feeling that Nazaryan believes that too. If he didn’t, why did the he fail to report on her entire record and focused almost exclusively on her claims to own a gun?
