Kamala Harris billed this year's election as a "fight for our freedoms" in her speech to the American Federation of Teachers on Thursday, shortly before taking a shot at our freedom to keep and bear arms. 

Addressing the AFT (not to be confused with the ATF, as Joe Biden has done repeatedly), Harris once again declared her intention to ban sermi-automatic rifles and criticized laws in place in more than half the country that allow for armed school staff to serve as a line of defense in case of a targeted attack on campus.  

Harris praised unions as the foundation of the middle class, and she criticized Republicans for their views on gun control and public education. 

“They have the nerve to tell teachers to strap on a gun in the classroom while they refuse to pass commonsense gun safety laws,” she said.

Harris added that “we want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books.”

There's not a single state in the Union that requires teachers to serve as an armed guardian or to carry a gun. No one is telling teachers to "strap on a gun." These policies give educators and staff members the option to do so after being vetted and trained. And as we've repeatedly pointed out here at Bearing Arms, research shows that the quickest way to end an active shooting incident on a school campus is to have both a school resource officer and several armed staff members in place. 

I'd say there's also a significant difference between conservative efforts to remove sexually explicit books from school libraries and wanting to put people in federal prison if they don't "voluntarily" hand over their semi-automatic rifles to the feds. 

In September 2019, while running for president, @KamalaHarris told me she supports a mandatory gun buyback program to get military-style assault weapons off the streets. https://t.co/kEhYu7IEWB

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 23, 2024

The Associated Press could have easily provided a fact-check on Harris's claims, but that would mean covering her campaign critically, or at least with neutrality. The AP can't even admit that Harris, in her role as vice-president, had a first-hand view of Joe Biden's decline. 

In Trump, Harris is up against the survivor of a recent assassination attempt with tens of millions of loyalists committed to returning him to the Oval Office. Just as Harris is trying to draw a contrast with Trump, he is working to do the same with her.

Trump went on the offensive at a rally Wednesday in North Carolina, calling Harris a “real liberal” who is “much worse” than Biden. The former president claimed without evidence that Harris had misled voters about the health of the 81-year-old Biden and his ability to run for the presidency.

Without evidence? Harris defended Biden's candidacy up to the point he announced via social media that he was dropping out of the race. I think it's fair to say she was a part of the effort to gaslight voters about his ability to do the job over the next four years... and even over the next six months. 

While the AP and the rest of the legacy media are doing their best to discredit anyone who thinks Harris is culpable in the effort to convince Americans that Biden was up to the job, as my friend Ed Morrissey at HotAir pointed out earlier today, some swing state voters aren't buying it. 

Despite all of the rhetoric about Joe Biden's withdrawal being about oh so courageous torch passing, and despite months of media and Democrat gaslighting about Biden's cognitive infirmities, voters have not been fooled. The debate exposed the fraud conducted on them, and voters are looking at Kamala Harris for accountability: 

Q: Who do you blame for President Biden being in office in this condition? Who deserves the blame?

VOTER 1: His whole staff. They work with him every day.

VOTER 2: So I think that's what makes me also nervous about the -- Vice President Harris. 

Q: Talk about that a bit. 

VOTER 2: So yes, she's going to be in it, but she also helped keep him in where he's at right now. And if he's really as bad as what they've been saying, I think if he steps down as president and she steps into his presidency before the end of his term, it almost makes me question it a little bit more why it didn't happen sooner. She's worked with him. She's been -- to my understanding, with him daily or at least a couple of days a week. Why hasn't this been brought to attention? If she's willing to hide that type of information once she's in office now, what's she willing to hide for herself? 

Whatever else she might be hiding, Harris is making no secret whatsoever of her contempt for the right to keep and bear arms. She's brought up gun control in almost every one of her speeches since becoming the Democrats' presumptive presidential candidate, and it's clear she plans on making a gun ban one of the central components of her campaign.