Joe Biden is the most activist president ever on gun control, putting thousands of gun dealers out of business by the middle of last year for trivial paperwork mistakes. He used government regulations to “debank” gunmakers and dealers, and those that survived faced higher costs. The Biden administration has also put together a national gun registry. But a President Kamala Harris would be even worse for gun ownership.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Harris ran to the left of Biden on gun control. While both supported an assault weapons ban, Harris wanted to force gun owners to sell to the government any firearms that she deemed undesirable. Harris went further than Biden in vowing to use executive orders if Congress did not pass the ban. The national gun registry makes this mandatory gun confiscation more doable.
Harris pushed for gun control this week in her first campaign speech as the presumptive Democratic nominee. And she has a long history of pushing for gun control. In early 2008, Harris argued for the constitutionality of gun bans in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. She claimed there is no individual right to self-defense.
Harris is the Biden administration’s “gun control czar,” overseeing the administration’s gun control initiatives through the White House’s new Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP), which coordinates the administration’s gun control efforts. The administration has also just put out a report failing to recognize any benefits from people owning guns.
The office is credited with helping to implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which introduces long and extremely complicated rules that will result in many gun owners being defined as firearms dealers. As I’ve previously pointed out, if you sell a friend a gun once and discuss the sale of a second gun, you must be a licensed dealer. Similarly, if you sell one gun and keep any record of what you bought and sold it for, you must also be a licensed dealer. Other rules are vague and give the government discretion to classify you as a dealer when it sees fit.
Under Harris’s direction, the OGVP is also calling for:
- “Eliminating gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability”
- “Banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines”
- Mandating that people lock up their guns
- Imposing background checks for all gun transfers
Take just the first proposal, which will make gun manufacturers civilly liable for the misuse of guns they sell. This would mean that people can sue manufacturers and sellers whenever a crime, accident, or suicide occurs with a firearm. The straightforward result would be to put gunmakers out of business.
Imagine what would happen if such liability applied to the car industry. The National Safety Council estimates that 46,027 Americans died and 5.2 million others were injured from car accidents in 2022. People can also use cars to commit crimes.
Note that gunmakers can be sued for product malfunctions and sellers are liable for illegal firearms sales (such as for not running a background check). To run afoul of this proposed rule, product makers need not do anything wrong. Car accidents often occur when a driver isn’t paying attention or drives recklessly, perhaps under the influence. It would be ludicrous to make carmakers pay for lost wages, medical costs, and pain and suffering because of a driver’s negligence. Yet that’s what the Biden-Harris administration wants to do with guns.
Gun-control advocates sometimes claim that gunmakers cater to the criminal market with low prices and products that are easily concealable. But lightweight, compact firearms also make life easier for the 21.8 million Americans with concealed handgun permits and the millions more in constitutional carry states who carry without a permit.
Women, who benefit more than men from owning guns, generally prefer smaller, lightweight guns. The people who benefit the most from carrying concealed handguns are the most likely victims of crime — poor, black Americans who live in high-crime urban areas. Making guns more expensive prevents some of those people from being able to defend themselves.
My research finds increases in gun ownership are associated with drops in crime, not rises. Poor people in the areas with the highest crime rates benefit the most from owning guns, according to my studies. Gunmaker liability would be sure to make guns unaffordable for them.
Police also believe gun ownership helps to combat crime: In 2013, when Police One (then an organization of police officers with 450,000 members) conducted a survey, around 76 percent answered that legally armed citizens are very or extremely important in reducing crime.
Then let’s take the rules on mandating gunlocks. According to my research on gunlock mandates, published in the Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, and elsewhere, requiring individuals to lock up their guns in certain states made it more difficult for those people to defend their families successfully. Such laws emboldened criminals to attack more people in their homes. There were 300 more total murders and 4,000 more rapes occurring each year in the states with these laws. Burglaries also rose dramatically.
That is not particularly surprising, given that crime rises when we impede people from protecting themselves. Indeed, the numbers show that cities and countries that have banned guns have seen an increase in murders.
Beyond all that, Democrats will have appointed almost 60 percent of the federal circuit and district court judges by the end of this year, with many refusing to follow the Supreme Court’s lead on the Second Amendment (for examples, see 9th Circuit Court Judge Lawrence VanDyke’s dissent here). By the end of the next presidential term, Clarence Thomas will be 80, and Sam Alito will be 78. If Harris replaces one or both individuals, you will have a very different Supreme Court.
Gun control will be a major focus of Harris’s campaign. In her first campaign event in Wisconsin on Monday, and again when she spoke to the American Federation of Teachers on Thursday, gun control was a major topic. Before the teachers, she mocked the concept of teachers being able to carry guns at schools.
More than 20 states allow teachers to carry concealed handguns. In Utah and New Hampshire, any teacher with a concealed handgun permit can carry at school. In other states, it is up to school boards or superintendents to decide. There have been no mass shootings, indeed no attacks where anyone has been injured or killed, under that policy.
Whether it is a national registration system that allows Democrats to confiscate guns or regulations that will put gunmakers and sellers out of business, Kamala Harris is working to eliminate legal gun ownership in America.
