One of the more tense moments in this week’s vice presidential debate was when moderators decided to fact-check JD Vance. They weren’t supposed to do any such thing, which seemed to irk Vance for obvious reasons.
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However, they didn’t fact-check Walz at all.
That’s OK, though, because on the topic of guns, the NRA’s America’s 1st Freedom was more than ready to do just that. And really, they had a lot to work with when you look at it.
Walz said, “Kamala Harris, as an attorney general, worked on this issue. She knows that it’s there. No one’s trying to scaremonger and say, we’re taking your guns.”
Like Harris’ utterance in the presidential debate, where she said, “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away,” Walz comments are plainly untrue. Harris has repeatedly called for a ban on semi-automatic rifles and, as noted above, it’s still listed on the pair’s issues page of the campaign website.
With more than 28 million of these semi-automatic rifles owned by law-abiding Americans, according to estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, these rifles are clearly protected under the “common-use” standard upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in D.C. v. Heller (2008). This ban that Walz and Harris are so eager to enact has been tried before. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which ran from 1994-2004, was found to have a negligible, if any, effect on crime, according to a congressionally-mandated study.
As for Harris’ tenure as California attorney general, she supported the most-unconstitutional gun-control measures possible. Prior to serving as attorney general, Harris even supported the idea that government can just walk right into your home to enforce its will.
“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 and safe in the way you conduct your affair,” said then-San Francisco district attorney Harris in 2007 at a gun-control event with then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (D).
Also as San Francisco attorney general, Harris earlier supported a city-wide ban on all handguns that included those already possessed by law-abiding city residents. So, contrary to what Walz claimed, Harris did want to take guns; at least from San Franciscans.
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There’s obviously a lot more there because Walz told a lot of whoppers that evening. This is probably the most important part.
Yet this bit also misses an important point, that just four years ago, Kamala Harris called not just for an assault weapon ban, but a mandatory buyback of those firearms. That would be the same ones that are in common use as noted above.
Today, she’s not saying she wants for any such thing, but we also don’t see any signs of a “come to Jesus” moment that may have changed her mind. The only reason we can see why she’d change her tune is purely because it’s not politically viable and she learned that in 2020.
On that fact alone, I have no reason to believe no one is coming for my guns. She wants to. She just knows she can’t. Not now, at least, but that might change in the next few years and if it did, someone would come a-knocking on my door wanting at least some of my guns. It doesn’t take wanting all of them for it to be gun confiscation.
We’ve beaten the drum on Harris’s claim that she could just waltz into our homes and see if we’re doing things correctly already, but that too is especially problematic.
Now, either Tim Walz knows all of this and is part of the lie or he doesn’t realize it and is therefore too stupid to be allowed out in public without adult supervision.
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