It’s October of an election year, and right on cue, the Democratic presidential ticket is displaying a sudden affinity for personal firearms. Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) recently attempted a pheasant hunt, and Vice President Kamala Harris is bragging about her willingness to shoot a home invader with the Glock we never knew she owned. I’ve spent 30 years sorting out the cosplay from the conviction when it comes to politicians talking about guns, and this crowd’s full of phonies.
A strong majority in the United States supports the right to keep and bear arms, and that’s why Walz and Harris feel compelled, at the end of an extremely close race, to pose as gun supporters. Don’t buy it. Their records in elective office speak more than their last-minute campaign stunts.
Harris is, without question, a bigger danger to the Second Amendment than anyone who has ever sought the office of president in the history of our country. While other politicians on the Left, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, flirted with the idea of gun confiscation, Harris has given it her full-throated endorsement over and over.
Harris told us when she made her first run for president that she was eager to take away our guns, forcing the confiscation of popular firearms safely used by tens of millions of people. She called it “mandatory buybacks,” the euphemism chosen by Australian politicians before they confiscated and melted down every privately owned gun in their country. Before that, Harris even told us she supported allowing government agents to come to people’s homes to see how they stored their guns.
Harris now brags about owning a semi-automatic Glock handgun and says she has owned it for some time. As attorney general in California, Harris helped implement a law that banned most Glock handguns sold after 2010. Of course, her handgun is a semi-automatic and mechanically identical in function to the semi-automatic rifles she would outlaw.
Harris boasted in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that if an intruder came into her house, that interloper would be shot. But back in 2008, when the District of Columbia v. Heller case that upheld the right to home defense was being argued before the Supreme Court, Harris led an amicus brief asking it to allow local gun control laws that outlawed home defense.
In fact, it’s impossible to find a single instance in Harris’s long career in public office when she took the side of freedom in a policy debate over gun control. She has been wrong every single time.
Walz’s record is different but just as troubling. When Walz represented a rural congressional district, I was the executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, and I gave him a grade of “A” and the NRA’s endorsement. But once Walz needed the votes of urban liberals to win his state’s Democratic primary for governor, he shifted to the far-left on guns. Since he became governor, he has been a gun control zealot.
In 2004, we watched Massachusetts lefty John Kerry pose in a goose pit just days before the election in an attempt to win the votes of Ohioans in a tight race for president. Even President Barack Obama tried skeet shooting down the stretch of his reelection campaign. The theater we’re seeing from Harris and Walz this month is no different. It’s cosplay, and it’s insulting that they believe supporters of the constitutional right to self-defense will fall for it.
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Harris has been for gun bans, magazine bans, red tape for private transfers among friends, you name it. In fact, there’s no gun control proposal active in Washington that Harris has opposed as a senator or vice president.
Any voter who understands that the constitutional right to own a firearm secures all the other rights we hold dear has no choice in this election but to help defeat Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Chris Cox, founder of Cap6 Advisors and senior adviser to Secure Our Freedom Alliance, was the political field general for the gun rights movement for 20 years as the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action.