‘Fact Checker’ Whitewashes Kamala Harris’s Call for AR-15 Confiscation

The media praetorian guard that has surrounded Kamala Harris in the last three weeks as she tries to run a campaign built on “joy” and good vibes, has worked overtime to erase policy positions she took and openly talked about four years ago during her disastrous run for the presidency in 2020.

Aside from ludicrously announcing (despite earlier reporting) that she was never the Biden-Harris administration’s point person on the border crisis, surrogates now also claim she’s changed her positions on hot-button issues like fracking, single-payer healthcare, the green “new deal” and more.

Among the issues her campaign claims she’s rethought is “assault weapons” confiscation. “I support a mandatory [gun] buyback program.”

— Kamala Harris pic.twitter.com/aty0rzV8XS

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 30, 2024

You may have heard her say “I support a mandatory buyback program,” also known as confiscation, but fact-checking sight PolitiFact is here to tell you not to believe your lying ears. In a stump speech, Donald Trump told the crowd that “She supports mandatory gun confiscation …  She’s for taking away all of your guns.”

In 2019, Kamala Harris spoke in favor of “mandatory” programs to buy back assault weapons. As vice president, Harris has focused on other gun measures. She has not called for confiscating guns broadly. https://t.co/OypfHya4Ze

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) August 7, 2024

PolitiFact parsed Trump’s language and rates the claim that Harris wants to confiscate guns as “mostly false.”

The phrase “gun confiscation” is broad and could lead voters to think that Harris wants to confiscate all guns from law-abiding owners. That’s not what she has said.

Further, those rights are constitutionally protected by the Second Amendment. In the U.S. gun buybacks are programs organized by local police departments that voluntarily allow people to turn over their guns in exchange for something, such as a gift card.

While running in the presidential primary in 2019, the then-California senator said she supported a “mandatory gun buyback program” for assault weapons. It did not apply to all guns, and she no longer holds that position.

See the difference? She only wanted to grab some of the guns, not all of them. And she hasn’t mentioned that in a really long time.

So there you have it. A whitewashing job by PolitiFact in hopes that low information types will think the claim that Harris wants to confiscate Americans’ guns is just a bunch of the usual Trump hyperbole.

Virtually no one believes Harris has changed her position on any “progressive” hot-button issues like socialized medicine, banning fracking, or — of all things — gun control. As is true of all politicians, you can tell she’s lying because her lips are moving.

There’s also the fact that she hasn’t actually said — herself — that she’s changed any of these policy stances because she’s refused to put herself in front of anyone who might ask her a probing or hostile question that might be difficult to handle for someone who’ , in the words of CNN, “historically been more vulnerable than when delivering scripted speeches.”

The moral of this story: despite it being constitutionally problematic (to say the least), Harris is still 100% in favor of not only banning “assault weapons,” but — if she can somehow get away with it — confiscating the almost 30 million rifles that are currently owned through a mandatory “buyback”… no matter what the gaslighting media and dishonest “fact checkers” may claim now.