On the DNC’s final evening, gun control was front and center… at least until Kamala Harris took the stage for her acceptance speech. Earlier in the evening, delegates and viewers at home heard from a steady stream of gun control-supporting politicians, from Rep. Lucy McBath to Gabby Giffords and husband Sen. Mark Kelly, as well as several gun control advocates who spoke of their own personal stories of loss.
Those speeches were centered on emotional storytelling, not policy. And of course, the phrase “gun control” was never uttered. In an Orwellian twist, restricting the fundamental civil right to keep and bear arms was billed as the freedom “to live without the fear of gun violence”, and the actual policies the Democrats want to put in place were almost nowhere to be found.
The same goes for Harris’s acceptance speech. Clocking in at well under an hour, Harris spent much of her time trying to define herself as a moderate; highlighting her experience as San Francisco’s D.A., for instance, and claiming she only had “the people” as her client… even when she co-authored an amicus brief arguing that the people of D.C. could be prohibited from owning a handgun without violating their Second Amendment rights.
But Harris never mentioned her long history of anti-2A zealotry. She didn’t even reference her support for a ban on so-called assault weapons or her past support for mandatory “buybacks” of semi-automatic long guns. In fact, the only time she mentioned gun control in her acceptance speech was a single sentence towards the end of her remarks, when she listed “the freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities and places of worship” as one of the “fundamental freedoms at stake in this election.”
As my friend Ed Morrissey at Hot Air pointed out in his live-blogging of Harris’s speech, “the definition of freedom being used here is a stalking horse for authoritarianism,” and I think that’s absolutely the case when it comes to the Second Amendment. None of the Democrats on stage in Chiago on Thursday talked about the freedom to protect yourself and your loved ones from harm, much less the freedom to purchase and possess firearms that are in common use for lawful purposes.
Instead, they spoke of the “freedom to live safe from gun violence” without every explaining how, exactly, they propose to get there. You don’t have to travel far from Chicago’s United Center to find neighborhoods that are plagued with crime and violence despite (or, in part, because of) the draconian gun laws that the city, Cook County, and the state of Illinois have erected around the right to keep and bear arms. FOID cards, “assault weapon” bans, restrictions on magazines, and “red flag” laws haven’t allowed residents to live free of fear anymore than California’s nearly endless number of restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms have soothed the fears of Oakland residents who want to keep illegally-armed drug dealers away from their kids.
If Illinois and California-style gun control laws aren’t enough to make us “free” from gun violence, then it stands to reason that Kamala Harris wouldn’t stop with even those heavy-handed infringements on our Second Amendment rights. So how exactly does she propose to make us “free from gun violence”? She’s not saying, and the silence of Comrade Kamala speaks volumes about just how extreme her anti-gun policies really are. In a night where Harris desperately tried to reinvent herself as a moderate, talking up her gun control plans would only have hurt her cause.
That just means its up to us to spread the word about what four years of Harris and Walz would mean for our Second Amendment rights. You can help our cause when you sign up to become a VIP or VIP Gold member. You’ll get exclusive content, an ad-free experience, and other benefits, but you’ll also provide critical support for our mission to bring the Democrats anti-2A freedom agenda to light. This deal won’t last long, but if you sign up now using the promo code FIGHT you can take 60% off your membership, while helping to protect and secure 100% of our right to keep and bear arms from Harris and those who want to infringe those rights while shouting “freedom”.
