“I’m a gun owner,” Vice President Kamala Harris said, trying to explain just why we could trust her words when she says neither she nor her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, were interested in taking our guns.

Yet just four years earlier, as a primary candidate running against her eventual boss, Harris’s platform included an assault weapon ban with a mandatory buyback. Now, she says she has no interest in such a thing, but I see no reason to believe her.

But as Cam pointed out earlier this week, it wasn’t the first gun ban she backed. As San Francisco DA, she backed a ban on handguns.

Charles C.W. Cooke notes at the National Review that this is an issue.

This is a crazy and unconstitutional position, and it tells us a lot about Harris’s radicalism. But it also tells us a lot about the broader gun-control movement, which has for years pretended that it is “only” interested in this or that sort of firearm but which actually regards the private ownership of guns as a problem per se.

…

In 2006, though, Harris was arguing the opposite. Back then, the problem was handguns. Back then, handguns were so much of a problem that San Francisco needed to ban and confiscate them. What was different was that handguns, thanks to their size, could be carried and concealed and left lying around. Obviously, Californians couldn’t be trusted with those.

…

Thus far, they’ve failed to achieve that proscription. But, if they got it, they’d swiftly seek others, because the aim isn’t to prohibit only one sort of gun but to limit gun ownership wherever it can be found. In 2006, Harris thought she could get a ban on handguns, so she went for a ban on handguns. In 2024, she thinks she can get a ban on certain rifles, so she’s going for a ban on certain rifles. The distinctions drawn in defense of the campaign are what they have to be at any moment, but the aim remains the same.

Precisely.

See, for all of Harris’s bluster that she is a gun owner and can totally be trusted with our Second Amendment rights, her history shows otherwise. If she were serious about not taking people’s guns, then why did she support a handgun ban while being a handgun owner? 

The answer is that, as Cooke notes, she’s a firm believer in “take what you can get.”

Gun control advocates wanted the handguns for decades. They argued that no one needed one, that criminals used them and law-abiding citizens could use a shotgun or something else for home defense, so it was all good. That never really flew, in part because too many people had one on the nightstand or in a closet.

Today, it’s so-called assault weapons. Fewer people have them and they’re used in much higher profile crimes such as mass shootings–though anyone who looks at the data will realize that more people are beaten to death with hands and feet than are killed with rifles of any kind–so they seem a more viable target.

Yet Kamala Harris’s past is a harbinger of our future if we’re not very careful.

Yeah, she wants assault weapons banned. Just four years ago, she wanted a mandatory buyback, and she will once again if she thinks she can get away with it. She’ll want a ban on handguns, too, if she can pull that one off as well. 

Little by little, she and those who come after her will take what we have, pretend we’re the radicals for wanting to keep our rights, then act like it’s always been that way and anyone who then tries to upset the new status quo is an unhinged radical.

The truth is that it’ll always be something until we’re left with nothing.