Kamala Harris’s Previous Support for a Ban on Handguns Highlights the Gun-Control Movement’s Broader Aims

Over at The Reload, Stephen Gutowski reports:

Vice President Kamala Harris supported a 2005 ballot measure that banned San Francisco residents from possessing pistols.

The Democratic presidential nominee backed Proposition H in her role as the city’s District Attorney at the time. The measure banned San Francisco residents from buying, selling, or even possessing handguns. With exceptions included for active-duty law enforcement, military, and licensed security guards, 58 percent voted in favor of the measure. But it faced immediate legal scrutiny from the National Rifle Association (NRA), California Rifle and Pistol Association (CRPA), and other gun-rights groups.

“San Francisco was a leader in proposing gun restrictions at the local level, and she never met a gun control law she didn’t like,” Chuck Michel, who represented the NRA and CRPA in its fight against the city, told The Reload. “Prop H was the crowning jewel.”

Harris broke with other prominent gun-control advocates in backing the ban and confiscation measure, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

This is a crazy and unconstitutional position, and it tells us a lot about Harris’s radicalism. But it also tells us a lot about the broader gun-control movement, which has for years pretended that it is “only” interested in this or that sort of firearm but which actually regards the private ownership of guns as a problem per se.

Nowadays, Kamala Harris is boasting that she personally owns a handgun, that, with said handgun, she would happily shoot anyone who entered her house, and that the only guns that she wants to restrict if she’s president are those dastardly rifles. Handguns, you see, are fine. They’re normal. They’re not “tools of war,” unlike the most commonly owned rifle in the United States, the AR-15, which Harris wants to ban because it’s so unlike the bog-standard handguns that even she, a Second Amendment–respecting, gun-owning, intruder-shooting sort of person, has consented to possess.

In 2006, though, Harris was arguing the opposite. Back then, the problem was handguns. Back then, handguns were so much of a problem that San Francisco needed to ban and confiscate them. What was different was that handguns, thanks to their size, could be carried and concealed and left lying around. Obviously, Californians couldn’t be trusted with those.

It might seem strange now, but there was a time in the not-so-distant past when the main focus of the gun-control movement was banning handguns. As a matter of fact, what is now known as “Brady” was founded in 1974 as the National Council to Control Handguns and became Handgun Control, Inc. after it partnered with the National Coalition to Ban Handguns in 1980. (Its offshoot “educational” program was named the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence.) It was only in 2001, after Al Gore’s support for gun control was blamed for his having lost his home state of Tennessee, that Handgun Control, Inc. was renamed the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and its leadership decided to start talking about other things.

Why? Because they weren’t getting anywhere, that’s why. It was certainly not because handguns were used infrequently in crimes. “Used infrequently” describes rifles, which, as a broad category, are used in fewer homicides than hands or feet, and which, when filtered to include only the weapons that Kamala Harris wishes to prohibit, are used so infrequently that the FBI doesn’t even keep statistics. Handguns, by contrast, are used in around 60 percent of all murders in the United States.

The biggest problem that has been suffered by the gun-control movement during the last 50 years or so is that, despite its best efforts, the public has become less and less convinced over time that handguns ought to be reserved to the military and to the police. But rifles? Well, that’s a little different. As Jacob Sullum explains at Reason (emphasis mine):

Although “assault weapons” fire no faster than any other semi-automatic, such as a Glock 19 pistol or a Ruger 10/22 hunting rifle, politicians routinely conflate them with machine guns, which have not been legally produced for civilians in the United States since 1986. Prohibitionists like Feinstein argue that “assault weapons” are good for nothing but mass shootings and gang warfare, despite the fact that only a tiny percentage of these guns are ever used to commit crimes. They say these firearms are “weapons of choice” for mass shooters, who are in fact much more likely to use handguns, and claim they are uniquely deadly, even though the category is defined based on features that make little or no difference in the hands of a murderer.

Josh Sugarmann, founder and executive director of the Violence Policy Center, laid out this strategy of misdirection and obfuscation in a 1988 report on “Assault Weapons and Accessories in America.” Sugarmann observed that “the weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

He added that because “few people can envision a practical use for these guns,” the public should be more inclined to support a ban on “assault weapons” than a ban on handguns. While handguns are by far the most common kind of firearm used to commit crimes, they are also the most popular choice for self-defense. Proscribing “assault weapons” therefore sounds more reasonable.

Thus far, they’ve failed to achieve that proscription. But, if they got it, they’d swiftly seek others, because the aim isn’t to prohibit only one sort of gun but to limit gun ownership wherever it can be found. In 2006, Harris thought she could get a ban on handguns, so she went for a ban on handguns. In 2024, she thinks she can get a ban on certain rifles, so she’s going for a ban on certain rifles. The distinctions drawn in defense of the campaign are what they have to be at any moment, but the aim remains the same.