Gun control advocate and college professor Fermin DeBrabander isn't happy about Kamala Harris trying to reinvent herself as a gun owner and Second Amendment supporter, which may be one of the few areas of agreement between him and honest defenders of the right to keep and bear arms. Like DeBrander, I'd much prefer Harris be truthful with voters about her past support for gun confiscation efforts and her support for a collective rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, but that isn't going to happen. Harris and her team have clearly decided that leaning into her long history of promoting extreme anti-2A policies would be a disaster during the current campaign, so instead we're left with a candidate who's supported bans on handguns touting her supposed gun ownership and declaring that you can support the Second Amendment while prohibiting the sale and possession of some of the most commonly owned firearms in the country. 

At The New Republic, DeBranander bemoans the current state of the gun debate and the need for Harris to reinvent herself, which he acknowledges is at least partly due to the fact that more Americans in the middle and on the left have embraced their Second Amendment rights over the past few years. The professor contends that "more guns will not solve the problem; they will not make us safer," but despite his claims, DeBrabander has no explanation for why crime rates appear to be falling alongside the addition of millions of new gun owners across the country. 

Harris wants you to know she protects herself and home with a gun; she is her own “first line of defense,” as the NRA would have it. But, as public health researchers note, residents of gun-owning households are more likely to be harmed or killed by a gun—not less. Guns at home are used in escalating incidents of domestic violence; they’re accidentally discharged by children; they’re intentionally fired in suicides. They also get stolen, and end up in the hands of criminals.

Lost in all the hyperbole over crime, and presidential candidates’ rush to prove themselves tough on crime, is a crucial fact: This country is growing safer, with a notable decline in gun violence. Here in Baltimore, where there were more than 300 murders per year between 2015 and 2022, the city is on pace to fall below 200 this year for the first time in over a decade. Boston, recently celebrated by The Economist as “America’s Safest City,” has had just 14 murders in 2024.

Most remarkably, this has happened without measurable changes in gun regulations, which our Supreme Court has effectively blocked. Baltimore and many other cities have invested in violence intervention programs, where mediators negotiate brewing conflicts and persuade belligerents that it’s not worth it to draw a gun. That message evidently works. Kamala Harris should try it.

DeBrabander says we haven't seen any "measurable changes" in gun regulations, but that's not exactly true. In Maryland, for example, the demise of the state's "may issue" carry regime in 2022 led to a huge spike in the number of carry licenses. There are far more people legally carrying guns in places like Baltimore than there were just a few years ago, and the city's homicide rate is in freefall. The gun laws have gotten better (or worse, from DeBrabander's perspective), and Baltimore is a much safer place than it was when the "may issue" system was in place. 

Harris's boast about intruders in her home getting shot isn't the "dangerous" rhetoric DeBrabander claims it is. The real danger is her unwillingness to level with the American people about why she's previously backed the banning and confiscation of handguns, her boasts that police could walk into the locked homes of gun owners to see how they're storing their firearms, and her belief that commonly-owned firearms could be prohibited without infringing on our fundamental right to keep and bear arms. Gun control activists may not like some of what Harris is saying on the campaign trail, but they absolutely love what she's tried to do to the Second Amendment throughout her political career... even though it should now be obvious to DeBrabander and other anti-gunners that restoring firearm freedoms doesn't lead to a more dangerous city, state, or nation.