Senator Kamala Harris is one of the federal government’s most notorious anti-liberty legislators. As the former Attorney General of California, she prides herself on having a record that not only shows that she wants to take people’s guns, but that she actually has. Now, Ms. Confiscation has a new post in Congress.
On Tuesday, January 9th, Harris was named to the Senate Judiciary Committee, one of the most powerful Congressional committees. It’s chaired by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, with Dianne Feinstein as the Ranking Democrat.
Some of the Republican Senators on the committee include Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Ben Sasse. Each is a staunch defender of the right to bear arms. But the Democrats have Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Dick Durbin.
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However, Harris will now be a sitting member of the committee. Her record of opposition to the Second Amendment is unrivaled by any federal elected official. Reason Magazine documents just how horrifying her track record is when it comes to not just advocating for, but actually confiscating people’s firearms in California.
Gun rights advocates often raise the specter of armed state agents going door to door to confiscate firearms. Kamala Harris helped make that worst-case-scenario a reality in California. Her attorney general’s office presided over California’s Armed Prohibited Persons System, which spent at least $24 million sending police to citizens’ homes to take away weapons.
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The target of this “common sense gun control” measure: people who had once been legal gun owners, but had since lost their right to own a firearm due an ever-expanding definition of unfitness, which includes having committed certain crimes, falling under a restraining order, or being adjudicated mentally ill. (The state’s databases of these failings are known to be highly unreliable.)
Normally, one with a lick of sense would see that spending $24 million to take people’s firearms is an extremely expensive way to carry out oppressive laws on gun owners; but the cost is of no concern to Harris, who believes that taking anyone’s guns for any reason, legal or not, cannot have too high a price.
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One example of just how reckless and aggressive Harris’ confiscation efforts were is a 2017 case where her office was forced to return 500 firearms that the Attorney General’s office had illegally confiscated from a citizen.
Albert Sheakalee was placed into California’s Armed and Prohibited Persons System, which he was not aware of at the time. He had no criminal record, and did not pose a credible threat to himself or anyone else. Somehow, he ended up in this database, and the Attorney General’s office made a spectacle of the confiscation event in 2015.
However, after years of litigation, the DOJ was forced to give Sheakalee his guns back because he should not have been in that system; an embarrassing mistake by the DOJ, and a costly price tag to completely undo everything they had done.
Yet does Harris regret the fact that her office persecuted this innocent man? Absolutely not.
That was just one example. Reason Magazine also discusses the fact that she actively lobbied licensing authorities to deny concealed carry permit applications for those who claimed they needed one. Apparently, a person simply feeling the need is so petty as to warrant a denial.
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As attorney general, Harris tried to ensure that people couldn’t get carry permits for weapons in California merely for reasons as petty, to her mind, as that they felt they needed one. She has fought in court to ensure that only police officials should be able to decide whether a citizen can defend himself outside his home. She got sued in 2016 in her former capacity as California attorney general for her office’s policies toward open public carrying of weapons.
Her general attitude about gun possession and gun law—despite the fact that she is a senator of a state where gun ownership continues to climb even as violent crime has dropped faster than the national average—is that gun policy should be dictated by how comfortable you feel after looking at autopsy photos of the children murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school. Literally. Speaking in October 2015 at “Politicon” in Los Angeles she advised that before any vote related to gun control or gun rights “They should have closed the chambers of Congress, on the House and the Senate side, and said all you members go in there, only you, and spread out the autopsy photos of those babies and require them to look at those photographs. And then vote your conscience.”
Make no mistake, this woman will do anything and everything she can, legal or otherwise, to gut our right to bear arms. She will fight for expanding the prohibited persons category, and will fight for legislative measures that contain licentiously ambiguous language that gives the government almost unlimited leeway to take a person’s guns.
Under no circumstances can nearly anything this woman supports be signed into law. She knows no limits when it comes to persecuting anyone who dares to own a firearm for any reason. The threat she poses cannot be underestimated.
