Harris’ Prior Support for Handgun Ban Part of Larger Problem

Charles Cooke of National Review Online probes Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on guns.

Over at The Reload, Stephen Gutowski reports:

Vice President Kamala Harris supported a 2005 ballot measure that banned San Francisco residents from possessing pistols.

The Democratic presidential nominee backed Proposition H in her role as the city’s District Attorney at the time. The measure banned San Francisco residents from buying, selling, or even possessing handguns. …

… 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.

Nowadays, Kamala Harris is boasting that she personally owns a handgun, that, with said handgun, she would happily shoot anyone who entered her house, and that the only guns that she wants to restrict if she’s president are those dastardly rifles. Handguns, you see, are fine. They’re normal. They’re not “tools of war,” unlike the most commonly owned rifle in the United States, the AR-15, which Harris wants to ban because it’s so unlike the bog-standard handguns that even she, a Second Amendment–respecting, gun-owning, intruder-shooting sort of person, has consented to possess.

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.

It might seem strange now, but there was a time in the not-so-distant past when the main focus of the gun-control movement was banning handguns. …

… The biggest problem that has been suffered by the gun-control movement during the last 50 years or so is that, despite its best efforts, the public has become less and less convinced over time that handguns ought to be reserved to the military and to the police.

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