In America, the gun is freedom’s prosthetic (followed by cars and credit cards). Yet Kamala Harris’s admission, first during an interview with Oprah Winfrey, then in one with 60 Minutes, that she owns a gun sent liberal heads spinning. Went one amazed headline on Vox, a leading liberal news site: “Wait, Kamala Harris Owns a Gun?” The astonished response to the news that a Democratic leader owns a handgun shows how far the country’s liberals have moved from what once passed as American reality.
Democratic presidents Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were all hunters who were open about owning a gun. Before he was elected president, Harry Truman proudly posed for a photograph holding two pistols he had bought that once belonged to Jesse James. And though FDR was the first president to try to pass national legislation restricting the ownership of weapons, Eleanor Roosevelt was said to often be packing a pistol in her purse.
Still, just as few people are as opposed to war as soldiers who have fought in them, owning and using a gun hasn’t stood in the way of a Democratic politician passionately opposing the wanton possession of firearms. No one hated what he referred to as the “extreme” policies of the NRA as much as Carter, who at one time claimed to own “a handgun, four shotguns, and two rifles”. And it’s not as if the other side corresponded to the caricatures of political positions that abound today. Nixon was caught on tape saying, “I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house.” Reagan, a firm defender of the NRA, alleged to sometimes carry a handgun in his briefcase, was a powerful advocate for the Brady Bill, which requires extensive background checks for prospective gun purchasers. He also supported a ban on owning assault weapons, which is anathema to just about every Republican now.
It’s a platitude to say that guns occupy a prominent place in the American psyche. But they are the most explicit dysfunction of American life. As our freedoms expand, so do our fears and insecurities; as freedom gets big in one dimension, people tend to feel small in another. As anyone knows who has sat basking in the sun on an American beach, only to have someone else plant themselves down a few feet away with a large incursive dog and a speaker blaring loud music, one person’s freedom is often another person’s misery. I have a suspicion that as the American sense of entitlement has trampled the sense of American responsibility, and as larger freedoms have resulted in feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy, sedans have been overtaken by SUVs, fast food portions have grown freakishly large, empty displays of personal virtue have grown bigger and bigger — and handguns have come to be seen as hopelessly inferior to semiautomatic weapons.
Harris’s openness about owning a semiautomatic — it’s a Glock, she told 60 Minutes — is probably the most dramatically symbolic step she is taking towards the way people live rather than how they ought to live. If I had my druthers, the next president would pass a national law requiring every gun owner to keep their guns locked up at gun clubs, as they do in Norway, Brevik’s slaughter being a monstrous anomaly in that country. But that is no more likely to happen than Utopia itself. What is within legislative reach is the shaming and ostracising of Republican lawmakers who oppose a ban on killing machines such as semiautomatic rifles. The country needs to return to the days of gun-loving liberal politicians leading the charge against the insanity of private citizens owning weapons of war. To the days when a liberal president could lay claim to common values, thus making it possible for a sense of shared community to push back the boundaries of radical individualism, inch by inch. Walz, a proud gun-owner and hunter, is squarely in this tradition. But he’s not running for president, and his presence on the ticket is too transparently expedient and ornamental for it to represent a positive step forward in this respect. Plus, marksman that he claims to be, he spends much of his time shooting himself in the foot.
It was, most likely, Obama, for all his political shrewdness often too comfortable lolling in rarefied liberal sentiments, who made the Democrats the party of anti-gun fantasy. That created an opportunity for Republicans to turn the Second Amendment into a matter of constitutional Armageddon. Obama’s remark, uttered in 2008, that people in red states “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…” hangs over the Democratic party to this day. Hillary Clinton pounced on that as an instance of unforgivable “elitism”, only to exhibit an identical elitism when she referred to the same segment of Americans as a “basket of deplorables” four years later. By 2016, when Obama blithely declared on CNN that he had never owned a gun, thus strikingly distancing himself from liberal gun-owning presidents who fought for gun control laws, a new generation of young liberal voters had complacently, and childishly, assimilated the idea that gun ownership tout court was a moral anathema.
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SubscribeLee, do us a favor and shut up. Kamala Harris was a major backer of Proposition H (handgun ban including confiscation) back when she was San Francisco’s District Attorney. Yes, you read that right. This would have banned the very same firearm she claims she owns now. Harris has supported every single bit of gun control no matter how extreme in her political career almost to Diane Feinstein levels. She was part of an amicus brief in D.C. vs Heller which is a matter of public record. That tiger is not changing its stripes anytime soon. What Harris is doing is speaking out of both sides of her mouth to different parts of the country and relying on people like you to uncritically push what she says.
https://cdn.thereload.com/app/uploads/2024/09/Document-_-The-Mercury-News-Archives.pdf
Fanboi stuff. Do we think the author believes what he writes? Is anyone ever that deluded? Is anyone ever that unaware of the facts?
She admits to owning a Glock. A handgun she’s promoted the banning of in two states, with a magazine capacity she’s promoted banning at a Federal level. Except in the detail of those proposed bans, she would have been exempt thanks to her weird self-classification as “law enforcement”. One rule for me, another for thee.
She isn’t embracing the American normal and the gun as olive branch, she’s desperately angling for votes. At this juncture she’ll quite literally say anything to be elected.
I really don’t think Harris owning a Glock is top of mind with people. The writer tries to makes some interesting but obvious points out of the news but ultimately it’s nothing.
This author is using language too big for his subject.