Audio: Harris Doubted Constitutionality of San Francisco Handgun Ban She Backed

Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned the pistol possession ban she backed as San Francisco District Legal professional was possible unconstitutional in a lately unearthed audio tape.

Throughout a 2006 speak with the Commonwealth Membership of California, Harris mentioned the earlier yr’s poll measure banning handguns was unlikely to outlive a courtroom battle. Her feedback come a couple of yr after she supported passage of the measure and a couple of yr earlier than she signed onto a Supreme Courtroom transient defending Washington, DC’s comparable ban.

“In a metropolis like San Francisco, with our historical past, is there any justification for anybody to hold a gun, apart from regulation enforcement, and why not ban them utterly within the metropolis?” moderator Mary Cranston requested Harris in audio first printed by The Washington Free Beacon.

“Effectively, there’s been a measure on the poll truly to try this, and it’s at present being challenged,” Harris replied, “and there’s a query about its constitutionality as a result of, after all, the Structure of america says that we do have a proper to legally possess firearms.”

Harris went on to jokingly evaluate banning all weapons to ending world starvation, arguing it was an unrealistic purpose.

“It’d be nice to finish world starvation and a pair different issues, too,” Harris mentioned. “Are we going to actually have the ability to do away with individuals proudly owning and possessing weapons? I don’t know. I don’t assume we’re anyplace near that proper now. So, I’d not, like, put all my effort into that as being the answer as a result of I believe it’s a great distance off.”

The feedback present additional perception into Harris’s file and examine on weapons simply weeks earlier than voters go to the polls to determine whether or not she or Former President Donald Trump would be the subsequent president. They present she has expressed a extra pragmatic view of Second Modification protections in smaller talking venues than implied by her public assist for the early 2000s metropolis handgun bans. Gun coverage has performed a restricted function within the 2024 election, however Harris has emphasised her personal gun possession in an try to persuade voters she received’t come for theirs, as Trump has claimed.

“She has a plan to confiscate all people’s gun,” Trump mentioned throughout the September debate.

“This enterprise about taking everybody’s weapons away; Tim Walz and I are each gun homeowners. We’re not taking anybody’s weapons away,” Harris responded a couple of minutes later. “So, cease with the continual mendacity about these items.”

In 2019, Harris supported banning new gross sales of “assault weapons,” together with the favored AR-15, and forcing present homeowners to promote their weapons to the federal government.

“We have now to have a buyback program, and I assist a compulsory gun buyback program,” she mentioned at an October 2019 discussion board.

Shortly after she took excessive of the Democratic ticket in July, her marketing campaign walked again that assist.

“Appropriate, the VP won’t push for a compulsory purchase again as president,” Lauren Hitt, a Harris spokesperson, informed The Reload in July. “She has expressed assist for crimson flag legal guidelines, common background checks and an assault weapons ban.”

Whereas Harris has repeatedly mentioned she won’t take anybody’s weapons on the 2024 marketing campaign path, she and her marketing campaign haven’t defined why she modified her place. Nor did they reply The Reload‘s questions on how she squares her assist for these insurance policies together with her 2006 feedback doubting their constitutionality or if she nonetheless believes the Structure protects a person proper to personal weapons, as these feedback suggest.

For his half, Donald Trump supported an assault weapons ban in his 2000 ebook The America We Deserve. The New York Occasions additionally reported he thought of backing one once more after the 2018 El Paso capturing. Nonetheless, he has not publicly pushed for a ban since changing into president–even shunning the thought after being shot by an tried murderer utilizing an AR-15 in July.

Harris was proper to be skeptical that San Francisco’s 2005 handgun ban would maintain as much as courtroom scrutiny. A California state appeals courtroom threw it out in 2008, and the town was pressured to pay tons of of hundreds of {dollars} in authorized charges to the gun-rights litigants who challenged it. Nonetheless, the ban was tossed for violating a state regulation that restricted what rules localities may placed on weapons.

The transient argued “for practically seventy years” American courts held the view that “the Second Modification offers solely a militia-related proper to bear arms, the Second Modification doesn’t apply to laws handed by state or native governments, and the restrictions bear an inexpensive relationship to defending public security and thus don’t violate a private constitutional proper.” It mentioned upending that understanding risked hindering prosecutors’ “skill to implement prison legal guidelines they’ve lengthy understood to be legitimate and compromised of their persevering with efforts to fight gun violence of their communities.”

The Supreme Courtroom disagreed and affirmed that the Second Modification protects a person proper to maintain and bear arms exterior militia service. The holding has been on the core of Second Modification litigation since then, however many gun-control advocates nonetheless reject it.