One stance that seems to have evolved is her stance on guns.

See, she's not that anti-gun anymore. It's part of why some consider her an option for Donald Trump's vice presidential pick--especially since there's no chance of it being Mike Pence again.

But how did things change?

Well, she spoke about that recently.

But the, she recalled how her attitudes changed after being on the campaign trail mounting a long-shot effort to gain the Democrat nomination. It is not the kind of narrative her former anti-gun Democrat colleagues want anyone to hear.

“I’ve got to tell you,” she told Trump, Jr., “as time went on and I spent a lot of time, especially over my campaign for president and the year since, with a lot of folks in New Hampshire and Iowa and different parts of the country, who had a very different experience than I did growing up.”

“They raised a lot of concerns about, around some of the things that throughout my time in Congress had all been coined as ‘well this is common sense gun safety laws. This is well-intentioned, in order to try to make sure that our communities are safe,’” Gabbard continued. “That’s a pretty compelling argument. But as with many things in Washington, as you know well, once you start peeling back the surface, you can understand that for a lot of folks who are using those words, they don’t have good intentions at all.” Then she lowered the proverbial boom.

“Their real objective is to try to get rid of the Second Amendment and take away our right to own firearms,” she detailed, “and our rights to defend ourselves, and even more pointedly, especially where we are now and where the Biden-Harris administration has taken us, our Founders intended the Second Amendment to be a check on the abuse of power by a tyrannical government.”

Gabbard’s remarks are quite a shift from when she was running for the presidency four years ago, but since then, her high-profile departure from the Democratic party, coupled with frequent criticisms of Democrats on Capitol Hill and the Biden-Harris administration, reflect something of an epiphany for the former Aloha State congresswoman.

As she continued explaining her dramatic change of course on the Second Amendment, Gabbard told Trump, “When you look at what the Biden-Harris administration has done, where they’re using the power of our law enforcement at county, state and federal level in different ways, using the power of the Department of Justice, the power of the National Security state, against American citizens…where they have no issue of using the secret FISA court to surveil Americans, illegally without a warrant, they have no issues siccing the FBI or other law enforcement agencies against American citizens who’ve done nothing wrong other than exercise their right to free speech, so over time my increased understanding, my being able to have some great and honest conversations with Americans who cherish our freedoms, who cherish the Second Amendment,  helped me better understand what it really meant.”

Gabbard is a gun owner these days and recently took part in the Tactical Games--think CrossFit or Hyrox with shooting--and has most definitely evolved on the subject of guns.

And she's right. They do want to peel back the Second Amendment. They don't mind the text staying in the Constitution, they just don't want it to mean anything.

Let's look at their arguments for a moment.

They either pretend it doesn't exist or doesn't matter, or they pretend the whole "well-regulated militia" thing completely negates "the people's right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

For all of his sins--and there are many, to be sure--California Gov. Gavin Newsom is at least a bit more honest than most of his allies. His constitutional amendment proposal at least offers tacit acknowledgment that gun control isn't constitutional as things currently stand. 

Look, whether Gabbard ever runs for office again is irrelevant. I found her to be one of the saner Democrats in most areas and now that she's found at least some degree of pro-gun views to go along with it, I have even fewer complaints about her. She's now a voice that might be able to sway a lot of other people who think they know what's up when, in fact, they don't. They only know what they've been told.

Maybe Gabbard can now go out into the world and inform some of these people about what she saw and what she sees now.