As an association, we often focus on specific attacks on the Second Amendment, whether they be red-flag expansion proposals, one-gun-a-month schemes, efforts to expand background checks or other similar infringements. Of course, since any threat to the right to keep and bear arms is a threat to our freedom, it’s very important that we track all such proposals and do our utmost to ensure they are soundly defeated.
With Vice President Kamala Harris, however, the dangers are even worse.
Here’s the far-more-serious problem with Harris, the Democrat nominee for the highest office in the land: She doesn’t even accept the fundamental underpinning of the Second Amendment. Kamala Harris refuses to accept that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. She refuses to accept that it is not a collective right shared by a group of people, but a right given to each of us by our Creator and guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights.
If you have a public official, like Harris, who takes the position that any of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights don’t pertain to the individual, she is never going to understand the impact her proposed gun-control laws will have on lawful American citizens. To her, such concerns simply will not matter.
As NRA members well know, the first 10 amendments to our Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights for a reason—within it are denoted numerous “rights” that belong to the individual and that are guaranteed against government limitation and infringement. Any American elected official who fails to grasp this foundational principle, or who understands it and simply refuses to accept it, is undeserving of holding public office at any level—and especially the office of president of the United States.
With Harris, this is not a hypothetical concern. She is on record declaring that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right at all. So much for the clear language and history underpinning the Bill of Rights. In fact, Harris proudly lent her name as the district attorney of San Francisco to a legal brief opposing what turned out to be the seminal 2008 ruling in the important Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller.
In that brief, Harris and several fellow anti-gun DAs from other big, Leftist-run cities throughout the nation claimed that the lower court considering the case had invented a new individual right that would only make it harder for them to fight crime in their various cities.
In that brief, they wrote: “For nearly 70 years, courts have consistently sustained criminal firearms laws against Second Amendment challenges by holding that, (i) the Second Amendment provides only a militia-related right to bear arms, (ii) the Second Amendment does not apply to legislation passed by state or local governments, and (iii) the restrictions bear a reasonable relationship to protecting public safety and thus do not violate a personal constitutional right. The lower court’s decision, however, creates a broad private right to possess any firearm that is a ‘lineal descendant’ of a founding era weapon and that is in ‘common use’ with a ‘military application’ today.”
These anti-Second Amendment prosecutors also argued in that brief supporting D.C.’s restrictive gun laws: “The District Attorneys respectfully join in the arguments set forth in Petitioners’ brief. For all the reasons set forth by Petitioners, as well as the various reasons advanced by the amici in support of Petitioners, the three statutes at issue in the D.C. Code do not violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia.”
Harris’ stance, set forth in that legal brief, tells us all we need to know about her disdain for the Second Amendment and other individual rights. And in the years since the Heller decision, she has continued to support all manner of government restrictions on possession of firearms by law-abiding citizens, including constantly promoting confiscatory bans on the country’s most popular rifle, the AR-15. Along the way, she has lauded Australia’s gun-confiscation program while criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court for its Bruen decision and a number of subsequent rulings striking down various gun-control schemes.
In August, Harris chose an equally anti-gun running mate in Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Once a supporter of the individual right to keep and bear arms, Walz turned his back on Americans when running for statewide and now federal office, cynically embracing all the same gun bans and other infringements Harris extols.
It will be interesting to see how the Harris-Walz translation of the Second Amendment being nothing more than the right to form a state militia resonates nationally with voters outside the states the duo has represented in public office (California and Minnesota). Hopefully a majority of votes tallied after the polls close on Election Day will reflect the fact that Americans reject the view that the Bill of Rights can be so casually discarded based on their vague notion of “common sense.” We must make our voices heard at the ballot box on November 5!
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