As an ethicist, I don’t have to agree with a Presidential candaidtes policies to find him or her ethical, unless a policy are per se unethical (like validating terrorism by forcing a ceasefire on Israel before it has destroyed Hamas), involves not enforcing laws (like at the Southern border) or violates the Constitution (as with Gov. Walz’s declarion that “hate speech” should be illegal). However, as an ethicist, it is explicitly my business when a Presidential candidate demonstrates a cynical contempt for integrity as an ethical value, for integrity is one of the most important of ethical values. An individual without integrity cannot be trusted.
Harris’s whole campaign is an effort to pretend integrity is a myth. Bernie Sanders issued a damning verdict on Harris (and himself) when he told NBC’s “Meet the Press “ that despite her efforts to moderate her positions since taking over from Joe Biden on the top of the ticket, such as purporting to support fracking and opposing “Medicare for All,” Harris was just being “pragmatic” and “doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”
In other words, lying.
The problem with lying, flip-flopping and denying what you have said before with such evasive answers as “my values haven’t changed” is that a practitioner of this deceptive game is likely to forget which fake position she is supposed to be supporting—especially if she isn’t all that bright. And thus it was that Harris, while engaged in the soft-ball interview to end all soft-ball interviews with Oprah Winfrey, said in the nauseating speech above that Americans want “freedom to be safe from gun violence” and later told Oprah, “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” Then, after cackling as only she can, the Democratic presidential nominee continued: “I probably shouldn’t have said that, but my staff will deal with that later.”
This inherent contradiction came on the heels Harris endorsing universal background checks, red flag laws, and a new ban on so-called “assault weapons,” by which she means common semiautomatic rifles. She has also said that the Second Amendment shouldn’t stop the feds from going house to house to check on whether gun owners are properly storing their weapons. As she suddenly embraced the castle doctrine with Oprah, the anti-gun groups she has allied herself with have argued for years that having a gun in the home makes people less safe, or in Harris’s blather-speak, without “freedom from gun violence.”
As Attorney General of California, she stopped Californians from purchasing modern semiautomatic handguns designed after 2013. That ban on their sale lasted until 2023 when a lawsuit brought by the California Rifle & Pistol Association won a preliminary injunction against it. She has also advocated for confiscation of semi-automatic weapons. Yet suddenly, she’s boasting about being a gun owner and talking like Bruce Willis in “Die Hard.”
What does she believe about handguns and the Second Amendment? What did “I probably shouldn’t have said that, but my staff will deal with that later” mean? She shouldn’t have said that because it was a lie? She shouldn’t have said it because it contradicted her “freedom from gun violence” guff? (As long as there are guns, no one can be “free from gun violence.” This is more of Harris’s “Imagine” cover.) Then she backtracked again and said that “assault weapons” (she means modern rifles, and either deliberately or ignorantly confounds them with automatic weapons, which are already illegal) were “literally designed to be a tool of war…It has no place on the streets of a civil society.”
The “tool of war” rhetoric is a tell: it’s meaningless, ahistorical, and deliberately misleading. The first semi-automatic rifle was developed in 1885, and semi-automatic weapons were developed in 1903 and 1905 by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company for the civilian market. You will note that the Civil War ended in 1865, and the U.S. didn’t enter the Great War until 1917. The Spanish American War was over in 1899. By “literally,” Harris meant “not at all.”
After Harris said that her staff would deal with “that” later, her staff tried to deal with it, and none too convincingly. Its solution: The Joke Excuse. Vice President Kamala Harris’ senior advisor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, told Jake Tapper repeatedly on CNN Harris’s comments about shooting intruders were “a joke.” “Well, she was joking. I mean, obviously, the vice president’s given multiple interviews and she knows that every single thing that she says will be picked apart. So I mean, it was a joke and she knew that we would still be talking about it today,” Bottoms said.
What does that even mean?
Shooting News Weekly fairly inquires whether any reporters will ask Harris…
- Do you stand by your actions as Attorney General of California which led to an effective decade-long ban on the sale of modern handguns in California, until the law was declared unconstitutional last year?
- If so, how do you square that with your recent statements that make it sound like you do not oppose the right to own handguns?
- Finally, as to any handguns you own, are they on the California handgun roster, or do you own any handguns that California law declares “unsafe?” If the latter, did you purchase it under an exemption not available to regular citizens?
Good questions, but she won’t be asked them. The whole point of the MSM’s coverage of Harris is to avoid forcing her to clarify her positions on any policy, because her election chances depend on voters having to guess. The closest she has to a clear policy is that Americans want “freedom to make decisions about your own body” even if that freedom denies another body of the chance to live. That policy requires pretending half of the problem doesn’t exist.
We have no idea what Harris really wants to do or believes in. Maybe she doesn’t know either. That’s certainly what her comments to Oprah regarding guns suggested.
And a Presidential candidate who doesn’t know what she believes in is no joke.
Ethics Alarms 
“I probably shouldn’t have said that, but my staff will deal with that later.”
What kind of person says that?
Oh, wait! I can think of one!
Her mentor: Joe Biden, you know the demented guy his staff has been cleaning up after for the last three and a half years.
I’ll say this about Harris, she may not be demented but her mental capacity and gravitas are no greater than if she were demented. She is simply not a serious person. Again, she’s a nitwit, and not a very charming one.
Nice work enumerating some of her flip flops and contradictions, but it’s like trying to reason with a two-year-old. She’ll say anything at any time. But it doesn’t matter. She’s the candidate of joy, joy that if she wins, Donald Trump won’t. She could do an interview and say she’s against abortion and it wouldn’t matter.
I don’t think Trump has a chance but I’m somewhat of a pessimist. It just seems to me that the powers that be are going to make sure Donald Trump loses the election one way or the other.
It looks like Kamala Harris agreed to a debate on CNN on 10/23. Trump declined saying it’s too late. It’s a lose-lose situation for Trump; you know it will be rigged in Harris’ favor. And, declining makes it look like he’s afraid to debate her.
Yeah, she’s always laughing, smiling, having a good time, having the time of her life. Yes, she’s a nitwit and probably the next President.
The resident presidential historian/leadership scholar will have to do a piece about the new presidential model: An anodyne stuffed shirt/blouse who says anything at all, or nothing at all and doesn’t even act “presidential” in any previous sense of the word while his or her known and unknown handlers run the country. The more ineffectual the “president” is, the better. We need a politburo of experts to run things. It’s for our own good.
Over on “American Greatness,” Roger Kimball extends an analysis of the dishonesty that characterizes the Harris campaign.
I’m not convinced the majority of people are “living” in reality and that Donald Trump will win in “something approaching a landslide.”
I’m still hopeful that Trump will win but after the 2020 election I question the integrity of the whole voting system.
The only way someone breaking into her house would be shot would be by her protective detail, something the American public does not have. She and her husband would be diving for cover under the bed or something, not reaching for a gun.
Also, “(she means modern rifles, and either deliberately or ignorantly confounds them with automatic weapons, which are already illegal)” – automatic weapons aren’t illegal, just exceedingly difficult for the average person to legally obtain unless licensed under special status with the ATF.
I’m trying to think of a good analogy for that definition of “legal”….
Maybe it’s “legal” for you to start your own social media service but not exactly easy to actually do?
Poor analogy… There’s a environmental difficulty to surmount, whereas the machine gun ban is a legal one.
Perhaps more like cocaine is technically legal, one you obtain the proper medical credentials and use cases.
The idea of a person running for president (also a sitting VP?) bragging about packing heat and blowing away an intruder is just so preposterous as to be unimaginable. Can you imagine what the press would have done had Trump said this? They’d have gone nuts for a week and insisted he have his guns taken away. Talk about breaking norms. This woman is simply not playing with a full deck. Doesn’t anyone see this? Her intellectual incapacity is being actively ignored the same way Biden’s was. But this is even more bizarre. Biden is demented, this woman is just a drooling idiot.
No argument from me at all. I work in education and see the complete and total blindness to reality every single day. Die hard “liberals” who refuse to open the eyes or refuse to recognize the evidence when place right in front of them.
Suppressors require a $200 tax stamp. Selective or full auto require similar and a background check at the level of a FFL (able to legally buy and sell firearms commercially). There are nuances, but as a basic understanding it works.
Almost no weapon in the US is ‘illegal’. All just require the right licenses. Supressors, short-barrelled rifles, short-barrelled shotguns, and machine guns* registered before 1986 are NFA items that require a $200 tax stamp, a more exhaustive background check, you agreeing to some onerous storage and transport requirements, and you waiving some of your rights.
If you want to own a modern machine gun (like a full-auto Glock pistol), you are going to need to register as an FFL and get SOT status to be a machine-gun manufacturer.
If you want grenades or exploding shells (like artillery), you will have to register such destructive devices individually with tax stamps for each one. If you use one…expect more paperwork.
So, you can get a jet with functional missiles and machine guns with enough money and permits.
Now, if you want a cannon, no background check is necessary if it is a black-powder cannon from before 1898 or a replica muzzleloading black-powder cannon.
*There are a few fully-automatic weapons (like select-fire broomhandled Mausers) that are specifically excluded from the machine gun definition.
From Newsweek:
When she was district attorney in San Francisco in 2007, Harris appeared to suggest that police should be able to enter the home of legal gun owners to inspect how they stored their firearms.
“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,” she said then
Her values have not changed, remember.
She can hold these beliefs without hypocrisy. If she believes in a multi-tiered justice system where she has the right to own firearms and use them, but the ‘little people’ don’t, this isn’t hypocrisy, it is just elitism.
I suspect this is what she truly means. It is also what I believe all the Hollywood types mean. They hide behind armed bodyguards, but they don’t want you to be armed because you could then threaten them. You can’t have your bodyguard push people around if the people could be armed. When Harris says ‘free from gun violence’, she means that powerful people should be free from gun violence from their inferiors. She definitely doesn’t mean that you will be free from armed criminals or armed IRS agents storming into your house.