In the Kamala Harris (D) political charade, armed citizens are the “usual suspects.” She is hoping to focus the mainstream media on demonizing those individualists who have the temerity to own and perhaps carry guns. This, in her world view, makes her moral; after all, if guns and those who own them stand in the way of an orderly and safe society—and this is the lie she is marketing—then she is a harbinger of pious authority driving out “instruments of death.”
Harris is telling the voting public that America’s more than 100 million armed citizens are the cause of violence in our society. Harris and her team are arguing this even though all the crime data shows lawfully armed citizens basically don’t commit violent crimes. Conversely, the voting public is supposed to ignore the reality that the policies of the far-Left, such as so-called “bail-reform” laws and soft-on-crime prosecutors, are allowing violent criminals to go right back onto the streets to harm more people.
All of this is clear in Harris’ record as a prosecutor, as attorney general of California, as a U.S. senator and as vice president of the United States. Nevertheless, Harris has been trying to sell a public image of her as a tough-on-crime politician. Her record in California as a prosecutor shows otherwise. In 2003, Harris was elected to be the top prosecutor in San Francisco. She ran on a campaign that included opposition to the death penalty. In her first year in office, she refused to seek that penalty for a gang member who murdered a police officer.
In 2015, then-California Attorney General Harris ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to stop enforcing “Jessica’s Law,” which prohibited sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of parks and schools. Approved by a whopping 70% of California voters in a 2006 statewide referendum, the law was designed to put a buffer between sexual predators and children. A state supreme court ruling did relax the law’s residency restriction—in San Diego—but Harris took it upon herself to stop enforcement of the law statewide.
A newly resurfaced memo, discovered and published by The Washington Free Beacon and circulated in 2020 by her presidential campaign, said that Harris wanted to “fundamentally transform” the criminal-justice system. This transformation included reducing penalties for many criminal acts, ending cash bail and court-ordered fines and expunging the records of some convicted felons.
Her plan also would have placed local police departments under increased federal scrutiny. The memo itself is about 15 pages long, but more than three pages are devoted to ever-more regulations and requirements for police. Upon reading it, one gets the clear sense that Harris felt the police were the big problem in the criminal-justice system, not the criminals.
Indeed, CNN admitted that Harris voiced support for “defunding the police” in a radio interview in June 2020. Harris said the defunding movement “rightly” called out the amount of money spent on law enforcement. She also emphasized that more police did not equate to more public safety.
In 2020, as the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., burned in the George Floyd riots, then-Sen. Harris tweeted for the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF), asking people to “chip in … to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
According to numerous media reports, the MFF bailed out a number of Floyd rioters who went on to commit future crimes. The New York Post found that money donated to the MFF during this time period “ultimately helped free people accused of murder, sex assault and other violent crimes.”
Who, then, is to blame for violent crimes in Harris’ world? Gunmakers and gun owners!
When she ran in the 2020 Democrat presidential primaries, the Harris campaign website promised she would hold gun manufacturers “accountable.” She called for the repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which stops frivolous lawsuits against gun makers. Her authoritarian streak was clear, too, as her website said, “If Congress fails to repeal the PLCAA within her first 100 days, Harris will act herself.”
Harris has also repeatedly supported prohibiting and even confiscating semi-automatic firearms, including America’s most-popular rifle, the AR-15. While attending a presidential campaign event in Londonderry, N.H., in September 2019, she told reporters that confiscation of these commonly owned semi-automatic rifles was “a good idea.”
Harris’ hostility to the Second Amendment rights of American citizens is so vast that in 2008, Harris, then San Franciso’s District Attorney, signed onto a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of D.C. v. Heller, a brief that argued that a total ban on handguns was constitutional.
At the August 2024 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago, Harris’ party launched a full-court press against the Second Amendment, using its “gun-violence epidemic” argument as camouflage for disarming law-abiding Americans. The 2024 Democratic Party Platform proposes ever-more federal oversight of local police and state prisons and reducing penalties for various crimes; meanwhile, it also calls for passing “universal” background checks and national “red-flag” laws, as well as mandatory storage laws for firearms in the home.
It looks like Harris and the Democrats have a plan to make America resemble California as much as possible. If you’re a bad guy, that’s good news. For law-abiding America, not so much.
