Kamala Harris Holds Gun Control Forum Without Firearms Experts

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Suppose you appeared at a “roundtable discussion” on guns, but nobody from the firearms community was apparently invited.

That’s what presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) did in Seattle. According to a report in the University of Washington DAILY, she sat with anti-gun Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, March for Our Lives representative Thomas Köhnlein, Democrat State Rep. Kristine Reeves, Robin Little Wing Sigo of the Suquamish Tribe and David Z. Bean from the Puyallup Tribe.

Notably absent was anyone from the National Rifle Association, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, any firearms retailers, range operators or certified firearms instructors.

Harris, on a campaign/fund raising visit to what many conservatives have called the “Seattle ATM” machine for liberal Democrats, reiterated her vow to take executive action on guns if elected president. She would give Congress 100 days to come up with a “reasonable” gun control plan and if that didn’t happen, she would ban the importation of so-called “assault weapons.”

But is that disingenuous? Several companies based in the United States manufacture the kinds of semi-auto modern sporting rifles Harris is talking about, namely guns built on the AR platform.
Harris told the audience that Congressional leaders have “failed to have the courage to say, hey fine if you want to go hunting, but we need reasonable gun safety laws in this country including universal background checks and a renewal of the assault weapons ban.”

Leaders in the Second Amendment community who were at the recent Gun Rights Policy Conference in Phoenix would remind Harris that the right to keep and bear arms isn’t about hunting.

Later, Harris talked about background checks, explaining that they are necessary to prevent dangerous people from buying firearms. Without anyone from the firearms community present to explain that criminals don’t get their guns legally in the first place, that side of the discussion was not heard.

The conversation got around to blaming the “current occupant of the White House” for fanning the fuel of hate crimes, with Harris reminding the audience that she is running to become the next occupant.

As the “roundtable,” which seemed to be about half-round in makeup, was coming to an end, Harris tried to paraphrase the late Coretta Scott King by observing, “The fight for civil rights must be fought and won with each generation.”

Apparently that only applies to certain rights, the least of which in Harris’ mind appears to be the right to keep and bear arms, enumerated in the U.S. Constitution and in most state constitutions.

And there was something else worthy of note. It was how local news agencies reported the event. While KCPQ, the local Fox News affiliate, and KING, the local NBC affiliate, both identified the event as a ‘gun control” forum, KOMO, the local ABC affiliate, reported Harris “was in Seattle participating in the ‘Seattle Gun Safety Roundtable’ on Friday. Harris has made gun safety a core component of her campaign.”

Coincidentally, just days after using this roundtable to call for a ban on so-called “assault weapons,” the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2018 was released. In Washington State, where there has been a push to restrict ownership of semi-auto rifles and passage of an initiative that invented a definition of a “semiautomatic assault rifle,” the FBI reports that only two of the state’s reported 232 homicides was knowingly committed with a rifle of any kind. Five more involved shotguns. Seventy-six of the state’s 138 gun-related slayings were known to have been committed with handguns, while 55 were committed with unknown or unidentified firearms.

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About Dave Workman

Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.