October 9, 2024

Vice President Harris, About That GLOCK…

By Larry Keane

When it comes to most mainstream media journalists, you can’t blame them for not knowing about firearms. They aren’t – for the most part – “gun people.”

On 60 Minutes, the CBS news program, Bill Whitaker demonstrated the latest frustrating example. He at least asked Vice President Kamala Harris what type of firearm she owned. It was a new and quickly forgotten revelation when she first revealed she was a gun owner in 2019, but has resurfaced recently after she repeated it during the ABC News presidential debate and then told Oprah Winfrey that she’d shoot an intruder if one were to ever break into her home.

The vice president said she owned a GLOCK and that, yes, she’d been to a shooting range. However, that was the extent of it – Whitaker moved along.

Her answer, though, opens up more questions that are frankly problematic for Vice President Harris and demonstrate again her hypocrisy of targeting law-abiding firearm ownership while ignoring violent criminals.

The vice president should answer a few more questions. Keep in mind, the vice president is a California resident, a state with arguably the strictest gun control laws in the country.

From all appearances, the vice president has a serious case of “Gun control for thee. Not for me.”

Relevant Timeline

In 2019, the vice president – then a U.S. Senator from California running for president herself – told media she owned a handgun and an aide later confirmed that “the handgun was purchased years ago.” The aide also stated the vice president kept the firearm locked up in her Los Angeles home. There’s no pinpoint to that timeframe and the vice president hasn’t provided any additional details. It could mean she purchased her firearm in 2015 or 2000. Stating the firearm was “purchased,” however, does confirm it was not given to her or handed down from family.

The vice president’s professional career also matters to her ability to own a GLOCK specifically. Vice President Harris began her legal career in California in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She started in Alameda County’s district attorney’s office. Next, she was recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and later to the Office of the City Attorney of San Francisco. She was then elected District Attorney for San Francisco in 2003, followed by a jump up to California Attorney General in 2010 and winning reelection in 2014.

What’s notable here is that California’s strict handgun possession and purchasing law, the Unsafe Handguns Act (UHA), was enacted in 2001. GLOCK handguns have largely been prohibited for purchase by the Average Joe in California. GLOCK Generation 1, 2, 4 and 5, in addition to U.S.-made GLOCK handguns are all currently prohibited for sale to the general public by California’s restrictions. Only Austrian-made GLOCK Generation 3 handgun models, which were grandfathered, are currently approved per the Unsafe Handgun Act (UHA). 

It is possible Vice President Kamala Harris purchased her GLOCK before 2001. If you believe that – I have a Golden Gate Bridge to sell you.

What is most likely – if it is in fact true that the vice president purchased at some point in the past 10 or so years and owns a GLOCK – is that she used the UHA carveout exemption for law enforcement, which included certain employees in the district attorney’s office or later when she was elected as attorney general.

The law states:

“This section shall not apply to any of the following:… (4) The sale or purchase of any pistol, revolver or other firearm capable of being concealed upon the person, if the pistol, revolver, or other firearm is sold to … any district attorney’s office … for use in the discharge of their official duties. Nor shall anything in this section prohibit the sale to, or purchase by, sworn members of these agencies.”

The facts are simple. If the vice president does indeed own a GLOCK handgun in California for purposes of self-defense, she possesses it under a gun control carveout that is not available to millions of law-abiding Californians. By the way – the vice president, as leader of The White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, is accused of colluding with gun control groups and the City of Chicago to sue GLOCK over allegations that they make unsafe firearms.

But Wait…There’s More

Not only would Vice President Kamala Harris’s GLOCK ownership be a blatant case of “gun control for thee, not for me,” she went even further to try to prohibit private handgun ownership in California.

Not long after the UHA was enacted in California, then-San Fransisco District Attorney Harris forcefully supported Proposition H, a 2005 ballot measure that banned San Francisco residents outright from buying, selling or even possessing handguns. Once again, as with the UHA, Prop. H included exception carveouts for active-duty law enforcement, military and certain licensed security guards. Prop. H was later struck down, but that didn’t stop Harris from supporting more gun control extremes.

At a 2007 press conference, while still serving as San Fransisco District Attorney, Harris told legal gun owners that authorities could “walk into their homes” to inspect whether they were storing their firearms properly under a new proposal she helped draft.

“We’re going to require responsible behaviors among everybody in the community, and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs,” she said at the time.

Supreme Attempts to Ban

It becomes even more hypocritical for the vice president to say she owns a handgun not available to the California public, given her tenure as a law enforcement official. In 2008, then-DA Harris signed on to a District Attorneys’ friend-of-the-court brief, or amicus brief, in D.C. v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court’s leading Second Amendment case. Heller, of course, was a challenge to Washington, D.C.’s, ban on handgun possession.

That means the vice president’s opinion was that not only could California ban handgun sales and possession, but that the Second Amendment doesn’t preclude total bans on handgun possession. In fact, her brief argues the right to keep and bear arms wasn’t an individual right at all, but that “the Second Amendment provides only a militia-related right to bear arms.”

There are almost too many levels of hypocrisy to count regarding the revelation Vice President Kamala Harris owns a GLOCK handgun stored in her private home back in California. There are almost too many instances to recount regarding her current gun control positions that deny Americans self-defense even as she enjoys around-the-clock armed security.

The vice president is attempting to score political points in the last few weeks before Election Day and trying her best to persuade gun owners she’s one of them. The problem is, she’s the living encapsulation of gun control’s fundamental hypocrisy: Gun control for thee, not for me.