Americans understand we face a momentous presidential contest this year. There is little need for my usual warning—no less true for how often it’s been repeated—that this is the most important election of our lifetimes. Each cycle in recent years has seen a sharper divergence on Second Amendment issues between the parties and their candidates. The Republican Party’s platform expressly speaks of the need to “defend … the right to keep and bear arms.” The Democrat Party platform, meanwhile, doesn’t even recognize the Second Amendment’s existence, and instead devotes one of its nine chapters to endorsing end-stage gun control.
If your vision of the future includes the right to keep and bear arms, Donald J. Trump is your only choice for president. Trump is a Second Amendment champion and would create a firewall of executive support and appointments to protect our sacred liberties. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, would escalate the whole-of-government assault she and Joe Biden have perpetrated against America’s gun owners and the firearm industry, regardless of any constitutional constraint on her objectives.
Fortunately, we don’t need a crystal ball to predict what these two alternative futures would look like. We can look to the recent past and the political careers of both candidates.
Kamala Harris, like Donald Trump, ran for president against Joe Biden in 2020. Unlike Donald Trump, however, Harris did not even clear the starting blocks. She suspended her campaign in December 2019, after failing to secure even a single delegate in primary voting.
Yet Harris’ bid was notable for the fact that she attempted to run to the left of Biden on gun control—not an easy task, considering his own fixation on the issue.
Relying on Australia’s example (a country with no constitutional right to arms), Harris supported not just banning AR-15s and other semi-automatic firearms (“assault weapons” in gun-control speak), but also forcing those who had already obtained them legally to surrender their guns to the government. The media misleadingly referred to this policy as a “buyback,” because surrender would supposedly be encouraged by compensation. But, to paraphrase Vito Corleone, it would be an offer the gun owner could not refuse.
During a televised debate in September 2019, Harris went even further. Congress, she said, would have 100 days to enact further gun control under her administration. Failing that, she would invoke executive authority. Pressing this point, the moderator asked Harris what she thought of Joe Biden’s reluctance to use executive action to “eliminate” so-called “assault weapons.” Harris then looked over at Biden and mockingly said, “I mean, I would just say, ‘Hey, Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say, yes we can.’” She then laughed over Biden’s rejoinder, “Let’s be constitutional,” as if the notion of a constitutional barrier to eliminating America’s most-popular centerfire rifle by executive decree was a self-evident joke.
Harris’ ignorance, arrogance and cavalier attitude toward the constitutional rights of the nation’s citizens was more reminiscent of Marie Antoinette than any serious contender for the White House. Yet Biden would go on to pick her as his running mate, and though rejected by her own party’s voters, she would become a fixture of what would prove to be the most anti-gun administration in American history.
To be sure, Biden did not disagree with Harris on the desirability of banning and seizing AR-15s; he just believed it would take an act of Congress to achieve. During an August 2019 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Biden was asked what he would say to “gun owners out there who say, ‘Well, a Biden administration means they’re going to come for my guns.’” Biden answered: “Bingo! You’re right, if you have an assault weapon. The fact of the matter is they should be illegal, period.” Throughout the Biden-Harris administration, both politicians made a regular habit of using the White House’s bully pulpit to call for sweeping bans on semi-automatic firearms, as well as the magazines that come standard on America’s most-popular self-defense guns.
Harris and her media collaborators are now desperately trying to walk back this record, insisting that she does not currently support firearm confiscation. They act as if the AR-15 doesn’t even count when it comes to discussing gun bans, as if it were an obscurity that could disappear without most gun owners even noticing. Lamely trying to “debunk” Harris’ own prior statements about gun confiscation, PolitiFact virtually dismissed rifles as worthy of consideration, stating, “the majority of guns sold in the U.S. are handguns.” But in a series of articles last year, ironically meant to demonize the AR-15, The Washington Post could not deny its massive popularity, acknowledging it is “iconic,” “revered” and “truly mainstream.” The Post even punctuated this point by noting: “1 in 20 U.S. adults owns at least one AR-15.”
Whether or not existing owners were able to keep their guns, a ban on AR-15s and similar semi-automatics would radically alter the landscape of gun ownership in America. And, as we have seen again and again both overseas and in anti-gun states, a ban on one category of gun inevitably leads to bans on others. California, for example, has expanded its own “assault weapons” ban multiple times. And in Canada, a country with a robust history of private gun ownership, the Trudeau administration now considers itself empowered to unilaterally decide which firearms can and cannot be acquired and possessed by the public. If guns are the scapegoat for problems of human behavior, no gun will ever be safe.
That is the future under a Kamala Harris administration.
Harris has a very thin record of accomplishments as Biden’s vice president, but she can boast of being the nominal head of the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Through this initiative, the Biden-Harris administration brought career gun-control activists into the White House, where they are paid by taxpayers like you and me to coordinate with their private sector and state-level counterparts to suppress Second Amendment rights.
Early initiatives of this office include developing “model legislation” and road maps to facilitate deep-blue states’ enactment of the same sorts of gun controls rejected by the U.S. Congress. There is also an Extreme Risk Protection Order clearinghouse, located within the U.S. Department of Justice, to encourage states to adopt “red-flag” firearm-seizure laws. States are now also coordinating in campaigns to sue members of the firearm industry for third-party crimes, a return to the bad old days of similar efforts under the Bill Clinton administration. Those efforts led to remedial federal legislation, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which remains in effect. But if Harris is willing to ignore the U.S. Constitution itself, congressional legislation poses even less of an impediment. In any case, win or lose, subjecting industry to never-ending litigation is a slow-acting death sentence in its own right.
Contrast this with Donald Trump, whose pro-Second Amendment policies and actions have continued to pay dividends for gun owners even during the Biden-Harris administration. The most important of these has been the three justices President Trump appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, all of whom were in the majority of 2022’s pivotal Bruen decision, which solidified right to carry and a strong standard of review for Second Amendment cases.
Almost as important has been the high court’s recent decisions on administrative actions, which constrain agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from simply making the law up as it goes along. All of the Biden-Harris administration’s over-reaching gun-control rulemakings—including on brace-equipped pistols, “universal” background checks and which unfinished parts count as “firearms” under federal law—are now in limbo thanks to these developments.
President Trump also withstood every form of pressure to hold the line against the enactment of additional congressional gun control. His immovable leadership prevented defections in the pro-gun caucus like those that led to the misnamed Bipartisan Safer Communities Act under Biden-Harris, a sprawling gun-control law that later brought shame and embarrassment to its moderate and “pro-gun” supporters.
Even in America, freedom is not the default. It has to be protected and safeguarded at all times. It is a rare individual who can stand up to the coordinated assault of activist politicians, legacy media outlets and others who stand ready to exploit any unexpected, emotional or destabilizing development to advance their objectives.
Trump’s unshakeable commitment was evident for all to see when he narrowly escaped death in Butler, Pa., only to arise with his fist in the air, exhorting his supporters to “fight, fight, fight” for their common vision of a renewed, ever-free America.
The contrast between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s approach to the Second Amendment is as sharp as the contrast between the former’s political gamesmanship and the latter’s raw courage.
This election season, gun owners have perhaps the final chance to ensure a future that includes the right to keep and bear arms. That future begins with a vote for Donald J. Trump.
