In the waning days of the presidential election, Kamala Harris (D) proudly told CNN that she owns a “Glock.”
This declaration represented one of the most preposterous about-faces of Harris’ entire campaign. Not only had she never mentioned this Glock before, but, in both the places that she had lived during her political career, she had been heavily involved in the efforts to make the private ownership of handguns illegal.
In San Francisco, in 2006, Harris backed Proposition H, which, if it had not been struck down in the courts, would have mandated the confiscation of all handguns anywhere within the city’s limits, as well as rendered their purchase, acquisition or transfer unlawful.
In 2008, Harris attempted to nationalize Proposition H when she co-filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case D.C. v. Heller in which she argued that the Second Amendment did not protect an individual right, and that Washington, D.C.’s 1976 ban on handguns was thus not only constitutional but could be applied everywhere else in the United States.
But then, 16 years later, Harris boasted that she was not only a gun owner, but the owner of a Glock pistol, a company that the anti-gun Left has particularly loathed.
What gives?
This question is rhetorical. What gives—or, rather, what gave—is that Harris wished to become president of the United States. And, as Harris was no doubt aware, the people of those United States are not even close to being on board with a ban on handguns (or any other guns, for that matter). Support for a ban on handguns polls at about 20%—which means that it is less popular than abolishing Social Security. It is fringe, radical, ridiculous. Lest she be accused of being a flip-flopper, Harris felt unable to explicitly disavow her past positions. Instead, she talked through it, telling the public that she owned a “Glock,” and that if an intruder came into her Washington, D.C., home, she would shoot the criminal down in an instant.
Evidently, Americans did not believe this. And why would they? From start to finish, Harris was a cynical, opportunistic, dishonest, vacuous candidate and nowhere—nowhere—was she more duplicitous than on the question of guns.
Harris insisted that “we’re not taking anybody’s guns away” while agitating for a ban on the most commonly owned rifle in America. She portrayed her running mate, Tim Walz, as a hunter, while putting out videos in which Walz was unable to load a shotgun. She promised that she was “in favor of the Second Amendment” after having spent years trying to prevent the Supreme Court from recognizing it.
This was all appalling, of course. But, in a strange way, it was also encouraging. Ideally, one would like to live in a country in which all of the candidates for president earnestly desire to protect our right and keep and bear arms. But, if that is not an option, having the anti-gun candidate feel pressured to pretend otherwise is the next best thing. It was noticeable that, despite its own chronic anti-Second Amendment sentiments, the legacy media gleefully blasted out Harris’ claims about her Glock, and, in some cases, even used them as the basis of the claim that she presented no threat to our Second Amendment-protected rights. Why did they do that? Because, like Harris, the press understood that her anti-gun position was a liability, and so they sought to pretend that it didn’t exist.
It didn’t work. The voters, who aren’t stupid, saw straight through it and elected pro-Second Amendment candidates. They elected a pro-Second Amendment U.S. Senate and, as this was going to print, looked to have elected a pro-Second Amendment U.S. House of Representatives.
Over the last decade, millions of Americans became first-time gun owners, and, on Nov. 5, 2024, many of those Americans swung toward the pro-gun candidate for the first time. If, in four years, the anti-gunners want to win them back, they’ll have to do better than pretending at the last minute that they own an unspecified Glock.
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