If a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court were to arise during the next presidential term—and it seems highly likely that it will—it is all-but-guaranteed that Kamala Harris’ choice would represent a vote to destroy the Second Amendment, while Trump’s would represent a vote to preserve it. Sometimes, politics is complicated. But sometimes, as here, it’s not.
That, in sum, is what this election is about.
But the Harris campaign does not want this to be a simple choice based on policy positions or their political philosophies, as she is way to the left of the mainstream, whereas Trump—regardless of what voters might think of his personality—is right in the mainstream of the voting public.
Think of it this way. If Joe Biden was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Kamala Harris is a wolf who denies the very existence of wolves. And that, if voters don’t look back at Harris’ record, is something altogether more difficult for voters to evaluate. It has been Biden’s habit to call for Draconian restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms while pretending that his positions are moderate. Harris has actually been for even more gun-control infringements than Biden, but, while running for president this time, her campaign aides and their friends in the media are working diligently to hide her words.
To expose Biden for what he was, one merely had to argue with what he was saying publicly at the time. To expose Harris, one needs to look back to the last time she ran for president and to her role as overseer of the new White House “Office of Gun Violence Prevention.”
Put simply, as this was being written, Harris has no concrete agenda, no legible platform, no current yardsticks by which she can be judged. She is for nothing and everything at once. And, most alarmingly of all, she seems to recognize no identifiable limits on her power. I am not, as a rule, prone to hyperbole, so I hope my words will be heeded without caveat when I suggest that, as a threat to the Second Amendment, Harris is unprecedented in modern times.
When compared to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and even Joe Biden, Kamala Harris comes out as the single most-extreme major-party officeholder America has produced in three decades. She’s not “same old, same old.”
For a start, Harris does not believe that the Second Amendment means anything tangible at all. In this respect, she is an heir to the now-discredited view of the American Bar Association, which, in 1975, proposed that “it is doubtful that the Founding Fathers had any intent in mind with regard to the meaning of this Amendment.” In 2008, Harris signed on to an amicus brief that was filed at the Supreme Court in connection with the D.C. v. Heller case, in which it was argued that the Constitution “does not provide any type of individual right to own or possess weapons.” The conclusion of this brief was that the federal government was thus permitted to impose the total ban on handguns that D.C. had implemented—and, indeed, to prohibit, restrict or even confiscate any other firearms that it saw fit to ban and confiscate. In the view of Harris and the other figures who signed on, the Second Amendment was an inkblot, a nullity, a piece of fluff. “Right of the people” did not mean “right of the people.” “Shall not be infringed” did not mean “shall not be infringed.” “Keep and bear arms” did not mean “keep and bear arms.” Practically, these words meant nothing of consequence to them and thereby served as no obstacle to complete disarmament.
This argument lost, 5-4. And, since that time, the Supreme Court has been concerned with the ancillary questions that the right’s confirmation has yielded. Does the Second Amendment apply to the states? Which guns are included within its remit? Can concealed or open carry be restricted—and how? For the American public, this is only natural. In 2008, 80% of Americans believed that the Second Amendment protected an individual right, and, over time, that number has stayed the same. For Kamala Harris, however, it is a mere inconvenience. Harris opposed the Court’s declaration once, and she will oppose it again.
This observation is not theoretical. One of the key jobs of any president is to appoint judges who interpret the law. And the sole Supreme Court justice who was appointed by the Biden-Harris administration, Ketanji Brown Jackson, evidently shares Harris’ view of things. Indeed, in the recent Rahimi case, Brown Jackson went considerably further than the others on the prevailing side and submitted voluntarily that, in her estimation, the Heller decision was wrongly decided. Kamala Harris has said that one of her “proudest memories” comes from “the day I confirmed the Senate vote for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.”
Donald Trump, Harris’ opponent, has compiled precisely the opposite record on the judiciary. As president, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court—all of whom have an excellent record on the Second Amendment, all of whom sided with the right to keep and bear arms in the seminal Bruen decision in 2022. Speaking about the right to keep and bear arms in February, Trump vowed to add more “conservative originalists” to the Court, who would “interpret the Constitution as written.” Harris, by contrast, is on the record complaining that the sort of judges whom Trump prefers are too concerned with “legalisms.”
Unsurprisingly, Harris proceeds from her assumption that the Constitution does not protect the right to keep and bear arms toward a gun-control agenda that, if enacted, would revolutionize the relationship between law-abiding Americans and their government. As is typical for figures who do not understand the purpose and application of the Second Amendment, Harris considers self-defense to be an inappropriate reason to own a gun. “You know what,” she told CNN at a town hall event in 2019, “you want to go hunting, that’s fine.” Perhaps she might have added “for now,” but it is clear that she considers this constitutional right to be nothing more than a legal privilege.
Naturally, Harris hopes to impose all the same regulations that her party has been demanding for years. She’s for instituting “universal” background checks, limiting the capacity of commonly owned magazines, creating additional “red-flag” laws, restricting the number of firearms a law-abiding citizen can acquire, stripping the rights of people who are placed on secret government watchlists and prohibiting the most-popular rifles in America.
What makes Harris different is that she does not even pretend to stop there. When she ran for president in 2019, she made a big deal of her support for a flatly unconstitutional policy that, in an attempt to obfuscate its implications, she called a “gun buyback.” “Gun buyback” is a cynical, Orwellian term used to describe the process by which the federal government would use the money that American citizens pay in taxes to confiscate their firearms from them against their will and then send them a small “purchase” check for a fraction of the gun’s worth. Or, to put it another way, “gun buyback” is a euphemism for a mandatory seizure of the citizenry’s guns that, among other things, would violate the Second, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This is a step that no major presidential nominee has proposed before in the history of the United States.
Worse still, Harris does not appear to believe that she needs Congress to implement her plans. In 2019, the primary theme of Harris’ campaign was that she intended to do whatever she wanted to do, irrespective of whether the legislature or the Constitution concurred. At various points while vying for the nomination, Harris vowed to impose sweeping gun control without Congress. “If Congress does not act within the first hundred days of my administration to protect Americans from gun violence,” said Harris, “I will take executive action.”
During a primary debate organized by CNN, Harris was told that, legally, she could not, in fact, do anything of the sort. Her response? “I would just say, ‘hey, Joe, instead of saying, ‘no we can’t,’ let’s say, ‘yes we can.’” Suffice it to say that a politician who believes she can confiscate firearms by executive fiat accepts no limits on her gun-control ambitions.
The election of Kamala Harris would create a radical threat to the future of our Second Amendment.
Trump’s policy platform on guns, by contrast, is, broadly, to “defend ... the right to keep and bear arms,” and, specifically, to make another push for concealed-carry reciprocity, so that any American who has a license to carry in his or her home state will be able to legally carry in the other 49. In effect, the plan would be to make carry licenses akin to driver’s licenses, which enjoy universal recognition between the states. A bipartisan bill to achieve this passed the House in 2017 by 231 votes to 198 and would almost certainly have been signed by Trump had it not failed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. In July, shortly after the first failed assassination attempt against Trump, the chief strategist for Trump’s Super PAC, Chris LaCivita, confirmed that, from an “issue standpoint,” the expansion of carry rights are Trump’s primary focus. Has the choice between two presidential aspirants ever been starker?
In essence, what we have in this election is a clash between two worldviews. In one view, the American public did not give up its pre-existing rights when it consented to the passage of the Constitution, and it retains those rights to this day, with the police and the armed forces supplementing, rather than replacing, the people’s role in the maintenance of their own defense. In the other view, the American public agreed in 1789 to be ruled by leaders who can, if they deem it necessary, completely strip the people of their arms. In this view, those leaders might make a special dispensation for foibles such as hunting, but they are not obliged to do anything beyond that.
Ultimately, these two worldviews testify to the trust—or lack thereof—that those who exhibit them have in the citizenry. To hope to increase the scope of concealed carry is to signal that you trust the average, law-abiding American to conduct himself as a free man. By contrast, to hope to confiscate the most commonly owned guns in the United States is to profess that, if exposed to tools of self-defense, the average, law-abiding American will become a threat. For those who cherish the principles of self-government, there can be no equivocation between these two choices. The election of Kamala Harris would not only represent a threat to all the progress that has been made in restoring the Second Amendment, but also would create a radical alteration of the presumptions that undergird the American experience. The federal government exists to ensure the rights of the citizenry, not to confiscate its constitutionally protected property in the name of novel social theories. There is a reason that Harris has attempted to conceal everything she ever stood for, and that reason is not that it’s too mainstream or too popular.
We have been warned.
