During his massive rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, Donald Trump brought up Kamala Harris’s gun ban plans, saying that she’s “pledged to confiscate your guns” and “endorsed a total ban on handgun ownership.”
Fact-checkers like Politifact were quick to try to defend Harris’s previous statements about mandatory “buybacks” of so-called assault weapons, claiming that she hasn’t “called for confiscating guns broadly“.
The fact-check that Politifact linked to was published back in August, and fails to mention several of Harris’ previous statements of support for handgun bans in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., or her statement in San Francisco in 2007 that, “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.”
Kamala Harris may never have said “hell yes we’re coming for your guns,” like Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke did during the 2020 Democratic primary, but she has endorsed bans on the possession of both handguns and so-called assault weapons. She’s also never explained why she supposedly no longer supports those positions, even though her campaign has been asked on numerous occasions.
Al Jazeera tried to fact-check Trump’s statement as well, but it too offered a woefully incomplete history of Harris’s support for gun bans.
As a 2019 presidential primary candidate, Harris said: “I support a mandatory gun buyback programme” for assault weapons. She no longer supports this policy, which would not have applied to handguns, the most popular firearms.
The Harris campaign told The New York Times that she supports banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government. As vice president, Harris has urged states to pass red flag laws and supported federal gun safety legislation that included funding for mental health and school security resources.
There is evidence that she supported a gun ban, but that was limited to one city nearly 20 years ago. In 2005 when Harris was the San Francisco district attorney, she supported a ballot measure that would have banned city residents from owning handguns. Voters approved the measure, but the courts struck it down.
Al Jazeera left out Harris’ support for a handgun ban in Washington, D.C. when she was San Francisco District Attorney. In 2008, Harris led a coalition of DAs in filing an amicus brief in support of D.C.’s handgun ban with the Supreme Court in the Heller case. In that brief, Harris and her colleagues called on SCOTUS to reject an individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment and to uphold D.C.’s handgun ban as constitutional.
While Harris may not have called for broad confiscations of lawfully-owned firearms, she has said on multiple occasions that existing gun owners should be required to hand them over or face criminal charges; handguns in San Francisco in 2005 and “assault weapons” across the United States in 2019. She’s also argued that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect an individual right to keep and bear arms, which of course opens the door to a nationwide ban on handguns, “assault weapons”, and even Tim Walz’s favorite shotgun.
On the campaign trail this year Harris has touted her own gun ownership and has declared that she and Tim Walz aren’t trying to “take everyone’s guns away”, but she has yet to explain why or when she supposedly changed her mind about the constitutionality of a handgun ban or a mandatory “buyback” of so-called assault weapons. Those are the facts, and any outlet pushing the narrative that Harris is some kind of moderate when it comes to gun control needs a reality check.
