Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both stepped out of their comfort zones on Wednesday, with Harris sitting down for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier and Trump joining Univision for a televised townhall. Only one of the candidates spoke about their views on the Second Amendment however, after Baier didn’t bring up Harris’s demand for an “assault weapons” ban or her past support for handgun bans in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
Trump, on the other hand, did talk about the right to keep and bear arms on Univision after receiving a loaded question about how he’d explain his gun policies to the parents of school shooting victims.
Trump pointed to the extensive gun control laws in the city of Chicago and their failure to curb violent crime, adding “it’s the person pulling the trigger, not the gun.”
Trump then turned his attention to Kamala Harris’s anti-gun record, telling the Univision audience that she’s “always” wanted to take guns away from lawful owners. While Harris has declared on multiple occasions over the past few months that neither she nor Tim Walz want to take anyone’s guns away, her campaign rhetoric is belied by the fact that Harris has supported confiscation efforts over the years.
In 2005, she backed San Francisco’s Prop H, which would have banned the possession of handguns in the city and forced existing owners to turn their pistols over to police. Five years ago she declared that it would be a “good idea” to include a mandatory “buyback” of so-called assault weapons in her semi-auto ban. Though her campaign now says she no longer supports a compensated confiscation of modern sporting rifles, Harris routinely says that those guns “don’t belong on the streets of a civil society”, which suggests she wants to do something with the more than 20 million modern sporting rifles in legal hands across the country.
After reminding his audience that criminals aren’t going to abide by a gun ban, Trump closed out his remarks by saying “we want safety. We want security, but we still have to adhere to the Second Amendment.”
It was a decent answer to a loaded question, though Trump could have been more specific in outlining both his own support for increasing school security and Harris’s previous calls to “demilitarize” schools by booting police and school resource officers from campus. It’s not just that Harris believes the road to public safety must pave over our right to keep and bear arms, which is atrocious enough. She’s now portraying herself as a champion of school safety when just a few years ago she was calling for the removal of law enforcement from school campuses.
Trump missed an opportunity to point out yet another of Harris’s attempts to reinvent herself on the campaign trail by flip-flopping on the issues of gun bans and having school resource officers in place, but he did remind the Univision audience that the policies she supports affect lawful gun owners far more than violent criminals. I’d give Trump a “B+” for his answer. I wish I could give Kamala Harris a grade for her sit down with Baier, but sadly she once again got a pass when a reporter had the chance to press her on her history of anti-2A extremism.
