San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris told legal gun owners in her area that under a new law she helped write, authorities could “enter” their homes and inspect their weapons to make sure they were properly stored.
“We ask everyone in our community to act responsibly. Just because you have a gun legally in your locked home doesn't mean we're not going to go in and make sure you're acting responsibly and safely,” Harris told reporters in May 2007.
This statement is Press Conference He introduced a bill that Harris helped draft that seeks to impose penalties on gun owners who do not properly store their weapons at home.
The bill, which had just been introduced before the city's Board of Supervisors at the time, ultimately It became law a few months later. Enacted by then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, the law was bundled with other gun control provisions, including a new requirement for legal gun dealers to submit inventories to the police chief every six months and a ban on gun ownership (even if legal) in public housing.
“San Francisco now has the toughest gun control laws in the county,” Governor Newsom said as he signed the new law.
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Workers set up a handgun display on the exhibit hall floor ahead of the National Rifle Association's annual meeting at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis, Thursday, April 25, 2019. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
At a press conference discussing the safe storage bill in May, Harris said the new bill aimed to codify “our values” in order to “encourage certain behaviors.”
“Making laws isn't just about creating opportunities to prosecute those who commit crimes. More importantly, enshrining our values in law is about trying to encourage certain behaviors,” she said at the time.
Harris has faced criticism for comments she's made about her “values” heading into November. Last month, she told CNN that her “values haven't changed,” while simultaneously reversing longstanding policies on nearly every front. Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has distanced herself from President Biden and sought to portray a more moderate image in an effort to appeal to a broader range of voters.
“As she said in her interview last night, her values haven't changed. She's said that multiple times,” Laura Reese, a border security expert at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital after the CNN interview. “She's saying to her supporters, 'Look, don't worry about what the campaign is saying right now. We just have to say it to get elected. But my values haven't changed.'”
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Meanwhile, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont, Independent) said Ms Harris was abandoning her previous far-left policies “in order to win the election”.
“Her views are not my own, but I view her as a progressive,” he said on NBC's “Meet the Press” earlier this month.
After completely reversing her far-left stance in 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris raised some eyebrows when she told CNN's Dana Bash that her “values haven't changed.” (Screenshot/CNN)
During last week's presidential debate, Harris was asked by ABC News host Lindsey Davis about her change of position on mandatory gun buybacks, but she didn't directly answer the question until former President Donald Trump continued to press her about whether he had a “plan to confiscate everyone's guns.” Harris supported mandatory gun buybacks during the 2019 presidential election and “Good idea.”
“This is about taking guns away from people. Tim Walz and I are gun owners. We're not taking guns away from anybody, so please stop lying about this,” Harris said in response to Trump's criticism.
Harris campaign spokesman James Singer told Fox News Digital that a Harris administration would “uphold the laws and rights of the American people, including the Second Amendment.”
“The law in question, requiring proper gun storage in the home, was upheld by a Republican-appointed judge on the 9th Circuit and denied review by the Supreme Court,” he added. “As Vice President Harris said during the debate, she is a gun owner who supports common-sense safety laws that Donald Trump opposes.”
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Semi-automatic rifles are displayed for sale on shelves at a McBride Guns store in Austin, Texas, on Aug. 25, 2023. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Harris has long been at odds with the National Rifle Association (NRA), considered by many to be the country's most powerful gun rights lobby. In 2009, the NRA successfully challenged a San Francisco law banning guns in public housing. But before the latest shakeup under the Trump administration, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the NRA and other gun rights groups after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their request to relax San Francisco's gun storage law.
“Law-abiding residents should be able to keep their handguns inoperable or inaccessible in the middle of the night, when they most need them for self-defense, when they are asleep and obviously not carrying their guns,” lawyers for the NRA and other gun rights groups said at the time.
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But a ruling by one of the 9th Circuit judges found that the law “does not substantially prevent law-abiding citizens from using firearms for self-defense in their own homes,” adding that the judge, who was appointed during the George W. Bush administration, had shown that “the law serves a broader government interest by reducing the number of firearm-related injuries and deaths that result from the presence of unlocked handguns in the home.”
