Vice President Kamala Harris (D) was supposed to “oversee” the first-ever gun-control department run out of the White House, known as the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. It was founded about a year ago, in September 2023. If Harris has done anything of substance with this gun-control office in the White House, it somehow hasn’t made news.
Still, now that she has been endorsed by President Joe Biden (D) to succeed him, this office offers a window into how she’d treat our Second Amendment-protected rights.
The Biden administration’s press release on the gun-control office calls Harris a “key leader in the Biden-Harris Administration’s effort to end our nation’s gun violence epidemic.”
The rest of the White House gun-control office includes “Stefanie Feldman, a longtime policy advisor to President Biden” on gun-control policy, as well as Greg Jackson, former executive director of the gun-control group Community Justice Action Fund, and Rob Wilcox, who has been the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety’s senior director of federal government affairs.
Officially, this White House office overseen by Harris has these goals:
- To ban “assault weapons and high-capacity magazines”
- To require so-called “safe-storage of firearms”
- To require “background checks for all gun sales”
- To eliminate “gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability”
- To “put more police officers on our streets for accountable, community policing and invest in gun violence prevention and intervention”
All of these goals are deceptions.
By “assault weapons” they mean semi-automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns. These rifles are the most-popular rifle type sold in America today. Indeed, semi-automatic rifles have been sold to the American public for well over a century. According to FBI statistics, all rifles are used in less than 3% of murders each year, and these rifles used by criminals are an unknown slice of that less than 3%.
“High-capacity magazines” are any magazines that hold more than an arbitrarily-determined number of rounds that is set by gun-control extremists. Sometimes that number is 15, sometimes it is 10, and sometimes it is even fewer. Regardless of the number of rounds determined to be unacceptable, most of the magazines that would be banned are actually the standard magazines that come with a semi-automatic firearms, and there are likely hundreds-of-millions of such magazines currently in circulation.
“Safe storage” is a term used to force citizens to lock up whatever guns they might still have if Biden or Harris get their way, and to do so in such a way that they won’t be available for self-defense purposes.
The “universal” background check idea puts the bureaucracy in the way of normal, law-abiding behavior that Americans have enjoyed since before the founding of this nation.
The “immunity from liability” claim refers to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which explicitly (click on the link and read it) does not give immunity for product defects or from any laws broken; it only protects gun makers and dealers from liability for other peoples’ criminal behavior.
The “community policing and invest in gun violence prevention and intervention … ” statement is too vague for analysis.
The fact that none of these deceptive and bad ideas have been made into law in the year since this gun-control office in the White House was founded is not necessarily a reflection of Harris’ leadership abilities (or lack thereof), as Congress writes the laws. Still, the fact that we have heard so little from her on the Second Amendment infringements she desires (and is supposed to be spear-heading) is telling.
But then, Harris has never shown herself to be a savvy political tactician doggedly working to get her ideas through the committees of Congress. She did little during her time in the U.S. Senate and she has not done much as vice president.
Still, she presumably sets and backs the policies outlined by this gun-control office in the White House and she has supported all of President Biden’s gun-control affronts to the constitutional rights of the citizenry. That said, if she is asked a serious policy question related to our right to keep and bear arms, she would probably just awkwardly, maybe even hysterically, laugh before citing an gun-control talking point.
Harris has never shown herself to be a thinking person who will look for solutions, even if they are outside of her usual politics. So, in essence, she is a puppet for the ideologues on her staff and in other parts of the administration. In this, she is very much like Joe Biden. And so, like Biden, she would, if she gets the chance, raise her right hand and swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution and then, as soon as practically possible, proceed to blithely attempt to take away our constitutionally protected freedom.
