Vice President Kamala Harris is a gun owner. Apparently that fact is supposed to make other gun owners less leery of her stance on Second Amendment issues.

There’s just one problem. Harris is a gun owner who’s also currently an integral part of the most anti-gun administration in American history.

As President Joe Biden’s right-hand woman on gun control, she’s helped orchestrate a four-year war on the Second Amendment, including through unprecedented efforts to weaponize the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives against the peaceable gun owners whose trust she’s trying so desperately to garner.

In fairness, her actions as Biden’s gun-control czar appear downright moderate when contrasted with her lengthy history of extreme anti-Second Amendment advocacy and discourse. For example, in 2008 Harris joined an amicus brief defending complete bans on the possession of handguns and advocating for a 20th century revisionist view of the Second Amendment that renders it little more than a superfluous authorization of state National Guard units.

Harris has also previously voiced her support for “mandatory buybacks” (i.e., reimbursed confiscations) of guns owned by millions of peaceable Americans—a call she’s cynically walked back but can’t deny having made in the first place.

Perhaps Harris is just taking a cue from her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. While Harris is normally a straightforward, no-nonsense type of gun-control activist who doesn’t beat around the bush, Walz takes a more nuanced approach that, at first glance, may even come across as favorable toward the right to keep and bear arms.

It’s an image he fosters on purpose.

Walz repeatedly touts his status as a gun owner, his affinity for duck hunting and his National Guard service to lend credibility to his support of restrictive gun-control measures, as well as to dismiss off-hand any criticisms of how these laws might undermine the Second Amendment.

He overplays his “gun expert” credentials for manipulative purposes, and not just by mischaracterizing the extent of his combat experience. He publicly boasted, for example, that he was “for many years one of the best shots in Congress,” a statement clearly tailored to allow him to dismiss without argument any contention that he’s anti-gun.

Walz’s tenure in the House of Representatives overlapped with the careers of numerous other members with lengthy military and law enforcement careers, including highly decorated combat veterans and a literal former SEAL sniper who finished his career as a marksmanship instructor; Walz's claim is hilariously self-aggrandizing.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Walz’s track record as governor is one of misrepresenting reality to garner support for controversial gun-control laws.

Consider Walz’s response to a recent tragedy in which a man killed two police officers and a firefighter during a standoff at his home. Despite being prohibited from possessing firearms due to his lengthy history of criminal violence, the perpetrator obtained the guns via illegal straw purchases by his girlfriend.

Did Walz promise to take actions reasonably designed to stop criminals from evading the state’s universal background-check laws?

Of course not. Instead, he immediately pushed to expand the state’s “safe storage” laws, which play virtually no role in preventing violent crimes by people who can’t legally own guns in the first place.

And make no mistake—even if Walz was a bona fide combination of Rambo and Buffalo Bill, it wouldn’t make his desired policies any less unreasonable or constitutionally problematic.

If anything, Walz’s experience with firearms makes many of his positions even more concerning, precisely because they don’t come from a place of ignorance but of willful misrepresentation. He should—and almost certainly does—know better.

Take his views on the possession of certain semiautomatic rifles currently owned by millions of peaceable Americans. He claims, based on his “authority” as a veteran, that these rifles are “weapons of war” that he carried into combat and that have no business on America’s streets.

Walz knows full well that the rifles he trained with in the National Guard had select-fire capabilities that render them functionally different from the semiautomatic civilian platforms he seeks to ban.

He knows, too, that the features distinguishing “assault weapons” from “non-assault weapons”—things like pistol grips and barrel shrouds—have no bearing on the weapon’s lethality or functionality, but rather make them safer and more practical for a variety of legitimate civilian uses, including for self-defense.

That’s also why Walz has no problem with being regularly surrounded by taxpayer-funded security details armed with these weapons to protect him—not from enemy soldiers in a combat zone, mind you, but from ordinary peacetime threats faced in ordinary American cities.

Harris and Walz can tout their status as gun owners and tip their hats in false homage to the right to keep and bear arms as often as they wish. It’s all subterfuge.

They’re still gunning for the Second Amendment.

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Amy Swearer is a senior legal fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.

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