Kamala Harris Was For Mandatory ‘Assault Weapon’ Confiscation Before She Was Against It

It’s one thing to run for office as a newcomer with a thin track record. Someone who doesn’t have a long history in office and hasn’t staked out a series of policy positions on hot-button issues is much harder to pin down and campaign against than a relative newcomer.

That’s the problem the Kamala Harris campaign is contending with. Not only has she been San Francisco’s District Attorney, California’s Attorney General, and a US Senator, she also ran a spectacularly unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 2020. You can’t have held all of those public offices and run that many races and remain unburdened by what has been.

So now that she’s apparently the Democrats’ selection to run now that the current President has been deposed, a lot of her earlier positions have become…inconvenient.

While being rated the second most leftist member of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body (behind only faux native American Elizabeth Warren), among the troublesome campaign positions she’s previously staked out is not only enacting a new “assault weapons” ban (of course), but also the outright confiscation of the banned guns.

Even she was smart enough back then not to call it confiscation, though. She couched it as a “mandatory buyback” because that apparently sounds kinder and gentler. Not only can the government not buy back something it never owned, though, but the clear implication is that anyone choosing not to sell their lawfully-owned firearms to the government will become a criminal and their guns will then be taken by, yes, men with guns. Compensated government confiscation is still confiscation.

Back in 2020, the eventual Veep thought nothing of bending a knee before Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex royalty to demonstrate her anti-gun orthodoxy. You can see, however, how that might not sell very well now to the current electorate, over half of which values protecting Americans’ right to keep and bear arms.

That’s why the Harris campaign has embarked on a Great Rebranding of her most radical policy positions. As the New York Times reports . . .

When she ran for president the first time, Kamala Harris darted to the left as she fought for attention from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing.

After she dropped out, social and racial justice protests swept across the country in the summer of 2020, and Ms. Harris joined other Democrats in supporting progressive ideas during what appeared to be a national realignment on criminal justice.

One presidential cycle later, with Vice President Harris less than a week into another race for the White House, video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.

TRANSLATION: The GOP is now using her own words and political positions against her. And there’s no shortage of material.

“The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things.”

That’s why Harris is now letting it be known that her thinking on most of these policies has changed. Evolved, if you will.

During the height of 2020, as America’s cities were burning and the priority was to save democracy, she used to be for socialized medicine, in favor of abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, against adding more police officers, and wanted to ban fracking.

Now, however . . .

The Harris campaign announced on Friday that the vice president no longer wanted to ban fracking, a significant shift from where she stood four years ago but one that is consistent with the policies of President Biden’s administration.

The Harris campaign will rebut most of Republicans’ attacks by arguing that they are exaggerating or lying about her record, said a campaign official briefed on the plans who was not authorized to discuss them publicly. Her campaign plans to lean into her record as a local prosecutor and state attorney general to burnish her image as a candidate with deep ties to law enforcement.

In addition to changing her position on fracking, campaign officials said she now backed the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement; no longer supported a single-payer health insurance program; and echoed Mr. Biden’s call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.

In other words…never mind. That was then. This is now. She was for all of those orthodox “progressive” policies before she decided that she needs to oppose them now. Being bitten in the ass by your own words not only hurts, it’s politically pretty problematic.

What’s noteworthy here isn’t Harris doing an abrupt 180 now that she has improbably found herself at the top of the Democrat ticket. It’s that she and her campaign seem to think anyone will actually believe that any of this is genuine.