Despite the assurances of Vice President Kamala Harris, her own past and current words confirm that Americans’ Second Amendment rights will not be secure if she wins the Oval Office in November.
Harris dismissed concerns about any potential violation of citizens’ rights under her administration on September 10 in the first presidential debate against her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
In response to a question from ABC’s Linsey Davis, Harris addressed a remark made earlier in the debate by Trump alleging she “has a plan to confiscate everybody’s gun.”
“And then this business about taking everyone’s guns away,” Harris said.
She continued: “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away. So stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”
To the shock of nobody who has paid attention to her political career for more than two months, Harris’ mask slipped only days after the debate.
During a conversation with the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Harris confirmed her support for a wide-reaching and ill-defined ban that would affect millions of firearms across America, and the citizens that own them.
Harris let her plans for a ban slip when a panel member asked how she wants to tackle handguns, the weapons used in an oversized share of U.S. homicides.
“So, first of all, yes, I am a gun owner. And Tim Walz is a gun owner. And we’re not trying to take anybody’s guns away from them,” Harris regurgitated. “But we do need an assault weapons ban.
Would you surrender firearms to a mandatory confiscation?
“Assault weapons are designed to kill a lot of human beings quickly and have no place [on the streets of a civil society.]”
Not content with targeting so-called “assault weapons,” Harris also said there was a need for universal background checks and closing the “gun show loophole.”
The targeting of certain firearms is nothing new for Harris, who, as a Democratic presidential primary candidate in 2019, supported a mandatory buyback program to pry guns from their owners.
“We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program,” Harris said in 2019.
“It’s got to be smart, we got to do it the right way,” she continued. “But there are 5 million [assault weapons] at least, some estimate as many as 10 million, and we’re going to have to have smart public policy that’s about taking those off the streets, but doing it the right way.”
Harris might have a hard time convincing gun owners to disarm themselves, even with the weight of the U.S. government to back her.
According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, data shows that tens of millions of modern sporting rifles (a catch-all term for the often-vilified AR-15-style rifles) are currently in circulation in the United States.
“The data continues to show that the modern sporting rifle is the most popular centerfire rifle sold in America today with over 28.1 million in circulation and being used for lawful purposes every day,” NSSF CEO Joe Bartozzi said, according to the National Rifle Association.
Considering the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives only has some 2,600 special agents able to cover the tens of millions of lawful firearm owners, the “mandatory” part of Harris’ gun-grabbing policies appears to be more of a suggestion than anything.
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