During the final stretch of his 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry notoriously tried to boost his rural and blue-collar appeal with a photographed hunting trip. At the time, Kerry, unsurprisingly, trailed George W. Bush in the polls among gun owners by a wide margin. 

Kerry’s campaign sought to combat his elitist profile. He was perceived by many as woefully out of touch with commoners. The photographs released displayed Kerry in camouflage with a double-barreled shotgun under his arm, but the public was not fooled. 

As many pointed out at the time, Kerry was hunting for votes, not birds. In reality, outside of the diligently orchestrated imagery of a political campaign, Kerry was and still is an east-coast anti-gun liberal. And Vice President Kamala Harris is just his West Coast counterpart. 

Last Thursday, Harris sat down with Oprah Winfrey for a live-streamed forum. One of the topics covered during the sit-down was guns. 

Oprah brought up Harris’s debate comments where she characterized herself as a “gun-owner.” Harris reaffirmed this. Then, in a predictable moment of inauthenticity, Harris said, “If someone breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” 

The crowd gradually began to laugh, as did she. As a means to portray the remark as spontaneous and unscripted, she followed up, “I probably should not have said that. My staff will deal with that later.” 

It is important to note Harris lives in the Naval Observatory. More seriously, her record and rhetoric illustrate just how bogus her faux enthusiasm for guns truly is. While the current Harris team may wish to perform a vanishing act to make voters forget her 2020 presidential campaign, footage of her positions cannot be erased. 

In 2019, Harris advocated for the national confiscation of many semi-automatic firearms, calling it a “good idea.” At subsequent events over the course of her unsuccessful bid, she repeatedly doubled down on this point. 

During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, she called for the government to “take” certain legal firearms “off the streets,” not exactly the language of a gun rights adherent.

Additionally, Harris has attacked the use of firearms for self-defense purposes. In 2020, she argued that stand-your-ground laws were inherently malicious, saying, “These stand your ground laws, and these states that have these citizens’ arrest laws have often, often and frequently been used as an excuse if not a cover for people who are motivated by racism and racial profiling. And so we have seen that. And we have seen that it has been used as an excuse to kill black and brown people, and particularly black and brown young men.” 

Most disturbingly, in 2007, San Francisco District Attorney Harris threatened that “just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way that you conduct your affairs.” How very constitutional of her.

Currently, much of the legislation governing gun policy has been left to state and local governments. These laws vary greatly. 

Iowans are not subject to the same gun laws as Californians, nor are countless other states. Local communities often hold more homogenous values. 

This homogeneity allows local populations to tailor their laws accordingly. That is precisely how such laws should be handled. 

Yet politicians running for national office seem to detest this disbursement of power. They want to hijack the independent will of the people–a move commonplace in the dictatorial executive policies of the Biden-Harris administration. 

Harris, like Kerry, is one cog in the Democrat political machine. And her sham support for the Second Amendment ought to be mocked accordingly.