When Kamala Harris was San Francisco’s District Attorney, she took a zealous approach to cracking down on legal gun owners. She backed Proposition H in 2005; a voter referendum that banned the sale and possession of handguns, requiring existing gun owners to turn them over to police. Though that ballot measure was overturned by the courts, city officials still had big plans for the few lawful gun owners inside the city limits.
In 2007 supervisors adopted a gun storage ordinance requiring all firearms to be locked up with ammunition stored separately unless the firearm was in use or under the control of the owner. As District Attorney, Harris would be in charge of prosecuting anyone caught violating the ordinance, and at a press conference she declared that, “just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see that you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.”
Harris has refused to discuss her comments on the campaign trail, but Snopes decided to take a closer look at her comments and “a video circulating online purported to show the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, saying that gun owners should expect visits from the authorities to ensure that they followed safety rules.”
While Snopes did its best to try to reframe her comments by including more of her 2007 statement, there’s really no getting around the fact that she did suggest the Fourth Amendment would be no impediment to police entering the locked homes of gun owners to see how their firearms were being stored.
For the most part, we’re not creating something new. It’s just time. And I think that with the rate of homicides that we’ve been seeing, and certainly our focus on that and our concern about it — it’s just time and it’s the right thing to do. And getting back to that earlier question, I mean, I think that the people who are going to oppose mostly what we’re doing are the NRA, and they are not African American, and people who live in this community and are traumatized by violence every day. It’s people who own guns who are quietly sitting on those guns, and those guns might end up being the weapons of the destruction of a community, because they get in in the hands of some kid who decides that they like what they see on television and they want to act that way. So this is about just basically saying that we’re going to require responsible behaviors among everybody in the community, and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.
The broader comments demonstrate that Harris has been a terrible public speaker for a very long time, but they don’t absolve her of threatening to violate the Fourth Amendment in order to enforce a misdemeanor gun storage ordinance.
While Snopes concluded that Harris did say “authorities could go into gun owners’ houses to check that guns are safely stored”, the website also offered up a dubious claim of its own in the final paragraph of their fact-check.
Harris, who is a gun owner, said during her 2024 presidential campaign that while she would support stricter gun laws, she would not seek to confiscate people’s guns, as her opponent — former President Donald Trump — claimed.
Maybe it’s a minor quibble, but Harris has offered no evidence that she’s a gun owner, yet Snopes presents that as a fact. And while she hasn’t said she’s going to confiscate guns during this campaign, in 2019 she said she was in favor of a mandatory “buyback” of so-called assault weapons, just as she was in favor of requiring existing handgun owners to turn them in to the San Francisco police in 2005. She has a long history of supporting gun confiscation, and Snopes could and should have acknowledged that if they’re going to bring up the issue.
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