While campaigning in Iowa last week, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) made a confession that would have been seen as unremarkable in previous decades, but which now strikes us as perhaps unusual for the increasingly far-left modern Democratic Party.
It turns out that Kamala Harris is…wait for it…drumroll please…a gun owner. Gasp!
Nate Madden of Conservative Review reports:
At a campaign stop in Iowa, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and California Sen. Kamala Harris stated that she owns a gun for protection.
“I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason that a lot of people do: for personal safety,” Harris told a group reporters. She cited her past as a career prosecutor.
She went on to try to distance herself from far-left proposals to confiscate firearms while promoting other forms of gun control.
“In terms of gun policy, though, I think that for too long and still today, we are being offered a false choice,” she said, “which suggests you’re either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.”
.@KamalaHarris on gun policy: “I am a gun owner … We are being offered a false choice, which suggests you’re either in favor of the 2nd Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.” #IACaucus pic.twitter.com/qAmPpTRHY7
— Iowa Starting Line (@IAStartingLine) April 11, 2019
But political observers might be forgiven for thinking that Harris’s paean to the benefits of gun ownership — such as increased personal safety — might come across as more than a little hypocritical.
As The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra tweeted in January, Harris has fully endorsed the banning of the cosmetically amorphous and technically undefinable faux class of firearms commonly referred to as “assault weapons”:
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) calls for banning semi-automatic weapons, says they have no place “in a civil society” pic.twitter.com/KR6VRtGjbu
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 29, 2019
One problem with this, as I argued in a Daily Wire op-ed in January, is that Harris’s logic could — and, if truly followed to its natural conclusion, would — lead to a ban on all semi-automatic firearms:
[T]he logic here is inescapable. Semi-automatic weapons are defined by their automatically reloading one new round into the firing chamber upon the discharge of a round. There is literally no intellectually defensible and mechanically relevant line to draw between much-maligned “assault weapons” and the run-of-the-mill semi-automatic handguns that tens of millions of Americans (including yours truly) carry daily. None. Zilch. A Sig Sauer or Glock semi-automatic handgun is, mechanically speaking, only distinct from an AR-style semi-automatic sporting rifle in terms of such technical specifics as muzzle velocity. But these are mere differences in degree — not categorical differences in kind.
Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro concurred at the time, writing that “Harris embraced a full-scale ban on semi-automatic weapons.”
It is therefore difficult to interpret Harris’s recent Iowa campaign trail touting of gun ownership as anything other than sheer hypocrisy.
Although Harris apparently highly values her personal safety, she may not have always highly valued her lungs. In a somewhat amusing incident in February, as The Daily Wire also reported, Harris was chastised by her Jamaican father for her facetious jesting about personal marijuana use:
As The Washington Times reports, Mr. Donald Harris — a professor of economics at Stanford University — is none too happy with his daughter’s casual joking about her Jamaican background in invoking her previous marijuana use.
“My dear departed grandmother … as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” Mr. Harris told Jamaica Global Online. “[As a family,] we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” he added.
The prediction market website PredictIt currently pegs Harris as the fourth leading contender for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination, after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), former Vice President Joe Biden, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Story cited here.
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