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. As a matter of fact, what is now known as “Brady” was founded in 1974 as the National Council to Control Handguns and became Handgun Control, Inc. after it partnered with the National Coalition to Ban Handguns in 1980. (Its offshoot “educational” program was named the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence.) It was only in 2001, after Al Gore’s support for gun control was blamed for his having lost his home state of Tennessee, that Handgun Control, Inc. was renamed the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and its leadership decided to start talking about other things.
Why? Because they weren’t getting anywhere, that’s why. It was certainly not because handguns were used infrequently in crimes. “Used infrequently” describes rifles, which, as a broad category, are used in fewer homicides than hands or feet, and which, when filtered to include only the weapons that Kamala Harris wishes to prohibit, are used so infrequently that the FBI doesn’t even keep statistics. Handguns, by contrast, are used in around 60 percent of all murders in the United States.
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. But rifles? Well, that’s a little different.
— Charles C.W. Cooke in Kamala Harris’s Previous Support for a Ban on Handguns Highlights the Gun-Control Movement’s Broader Aims
The end goal of restricting and confiscating all guns has not changed. As POTG know enough is never enough.
Some people simply cannot be trusted.