Kamala Harris is desperate to promote herself as the "change" candidate, though the latest NYTimes/Siena poll offers plenty of evidence that her efforts are failing. There's a good reason for that: she's essentially the incumbent candidate now that Joe Biden's been pushed aside. And when it comes to the issue of our Second Amendment rights, Harris is offering four more years of attacking gun owners and the right to keep and bear arms in the name of public safety.
After the campaign spent all of August offering little in the way of actual policies, the Harris/Walz campaign unveiled its "New Way Forward" agenda on Sunday, but there's nothing new of note in her gun control plans, which simply parrot the talking points of gun control advocates while offering no specifics about the anti-gun policies she says she'd pursue if elected.
As President, she won’t stop fighting so that Americans have the freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship. She’ll ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require universal background checks, and support red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. She will also continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them, and will build upon proven gun violence prevention programs that have helped reduce violent crime throughout the country.
There's no iteration of an "assault weapons" ban that's going to find favor with Second Amendment supporters, but given that Harris has supposedly reversed course on her previous support for a mandatory "buyback" of banned firearms, the lack of specificity is still troubling. What does an "assault weapons" ban mean, in her eyes? Is it the GOSAFE Act offered by Senate Democrats like New Mexico's Martin Heinrich, which would outlaw the sale and manufacture of gas-operated semi-automatic long guns? Is she calling for a California-style gun ban that prohibits certain cosmetic features? The term "assault weapon" is meaningless from a legal perspective, so all Harris is telling us is that she wants to ban, in some way, the most commonly sold rifles in the country.
Then there's the fact that California already has every one of the laws Harris is demanding, yet "gun violence" is still a daily fact of life for residents in cities like Oakland, and the state had the highest number of active shooting incidents of any state in the Union last year. Even with an "assault weapon" ban, "universal" background checks, and a "red flag" law (along with many other restrictions on legal gun owners), California isn't immune from "gun violence", including a disturbing incident in Monterey County last week where a man is accused of shooting and killing more than 80 horses, goats, and chickens over a three-hour period.
Vicente Arroyo, 39, made his first court appearance Thursday after Monterey County Sheriff deputies arrested him earlier in the week for allegedly using several weapons to shoot the animals being housed in pens and cages on a lot in the small community of Prunedale.
The animal owners do not want to be identified or speak with the media, Monterey County Sheriff Commander Andres Rosas told The Associated Press Friday.
“I went out there, and it was a pretty traumatic scene. These were people’s pets,” he said.
One of the miniature horses belonged to the owner of the lot where the animals were housed, and the other 80 belonged to someone who rented the land to house their pets, Rosas said.
According to court records, Arroyo was charged with killing 14 goats, nine chickens, seven ducks, five rabbits, a guinea pig and 33 parakeets and cockatiels. Arroyo is also charged with killing a pony named Lucky and two miniature horses named Estrella and Princessa, KSBW-TV reported.
Arroyo's attorney says his client was suffering from a mental health crisis and his family had reached out to multiple government agencies for help, but "unfortunately, he did not receive that mental health help in time before this tragic incident.”
Arroyo's also a convicted felon, but that didn't stop him from getting his hands on multiple firearms and about 2,000 rounds of ammunition, even though California requires background checks be done for both firearm and ammo purchases.
If California's vaunted gun laws weren't able to stop Arroyo from allegedly carrying out his rampage, and haven't prevented Oakland from coming "under siege" from armed criminals, then why should voters believe Harris when she says that her California-style anti-gun agenda will provide Americans with the "freedom to live safe from gun violence"?
Harris is offering nothing more than stale talking points from the gun control lobby and the empty promise of increased safety at the expense of our right to protect and defend ourselves and our loved ones. Heck, Harris doesn't even want school resource officers on campus to protect students and staff, or at least that was the case when she was running for president five years ago. Her "New Way Forward" doesn't mention her old stance, and I wouldn't be surprised if she tries to weasel her way out of her progressive positioning by claiming she's "evolved" on the issue without explaining why or what changed her mind, just as she's done with her supposed reversal of a mandatory "buyback" of so-called assault weapons.
Harris is still running on an anti-2A platform, but she's also running from many of the stated positions she took just a few years ago because she knows they're political poison to broad swathes of voters. It doesn't seem to be helping her as far as the polls go, but it's still probably her best strategy between now and November, so I don't expect we'll see any more details emerge from her campaign unless or until the media calls her out for her lack of substance. Given the puff pieces that we've seen in recent days, that's an unlikely development as well, so it will be up to gun owners, Second Amendment supporters, and the Trump campaign to fill in the blanks left by Harris and her handlers.
