My friend and colleague Ed Morrissey at HotAir likes to describe the press as the “protection racket media”, and a new piece from the website The 19th definitely fits that bill. While reporter Jennifer Gerson promises a look at the “decades-long shaping of Kamala Harris’ gun policy”, she completely ignored the extremist positions that Harris has adopted over the years when it comes to our right to keep and bear arms. 

During Harris’ tenure as San Francisco District Attorney, for example, she supported a local referendum to ban handguns in the city that required existing owners to hand them over to police. She argued that the Supreme Court should not recognize an individual right to keep and bear arms, and should keep Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban in place. She even told gun owners, “Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible.” 

None of those actions appear in Gerson’s story. Instead, she begins her piece by talking about Harris’s first meeting and long friendship with Mattie Scott, a local gun control activist whose son was murdered in 1996. Scott is now the head of the California chapter of the gun control group Brady, so you’d think that Gerson might have quizzed her about Harris’s support for a handgun ban in the city they both called home. Instead, this is all she has to say about Harris’ time in San Francisco:

She won the DA race and soon after, opened an office to help young men who had been charged with gun violence crimes find a new path forward, with jobs and social support. She also created a new unit of prosecutors from across various departments to innovate on the prosecution of gun violence — and community-based solutions that could prevent it.

“And I tell you, things began to get better for us,” Scott said. “Not in the sense of violence stopping right away, of course, because the influx of guns was everywhere. But we had a DA who opened her door to us, who felt the pain of us mothers in our community.”

Harris kept going to Scott’s healing circles; if she couldn’t make a session, she sent her assistant district attorney in her place. She also went to vigils, funerals, community meetings, town hall forums, sitting shoulder to shoulder with the predominantly Black, Latinx and Pacific Islander people who were impacted. 

Gerson spoke to almost a dozen gun control activists for her piece, and as you’d expect, all of them were full of unqualified praise for the Democratic candidate while shying away from bringing up things like her support for handgun bans, her objection to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen, and remarkably, even her support for a ban on so-called assault weapons. 

If Kamala Harris’ career had been spent in support of “community-based solutions” to violent crime, gun owners and Second Amendment supporters wouldn’t be nearly as opposed to her candidacy as they are. But from her earliest days in politics, Harris has tried to eradicate the community of lawful gun owners and infringe on their right to keep and bear arms. 

Giffords executive director Emma Brown told Gerson that “today, gun safety is unequivocally a ‘winning issue.'” If that really was the case, then why is Giffords itself running ads in battleground states focusing exclusively on expanding background checks instead of ads touting Harris’ support for things like a semi-auto ban or her opposition to “shall issue” right-to-carry laws? Why did Gerson studiously avoid those topics as well in her lengthy piece purporting to detail Harris’ gun policies over the past 20 years? 

Gerson could have honestly and accurately reported on Harris’ extensive history of anti-gun extremism. She could have asked Brown what she thought about Harris declaring she owns a Glock when Giffords’ founder Gabby Giffords has said her goal is “no more guns.” She could have asked gun control researcher Garen Wintemute what he thinks about Harris dropping a demand for a mandatory “buyback” of so-called assault weapons on the campaign trail this year when she called it a “good idea” in 2019. 

It’s journalistic malpractice not to bring up these things in a piece that’s supposedly all about Harris’ history with guns, but it’s also par for the course when it comes to the protection racket media and its reporting on Harris and gun control. If the anti-2A positions that Harris has taken over the years were as popular as Brown and other anti-gun activists claim, they’d be trumpeting her past support for handgun bans and a collective rights view of the Second Amendment instead of trying to hide her views from the voters. The media and their allies in the gun control lobby know these positions are political poison, and that’s why they’re covering up Harris’ hostility toward the right to keep and bear arms instead of simply covering what she’s said and done over the years.