Harris says she’s not going to take anyone’s guns away ...

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

If the current media narrative is to be believed, Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t interested in taking away anyone’s guns. She just wants reasonable, common-sense gun control. She is, after all, a gun owner herself, isn’t she?

There’s one slight hiccup in the narrative: for a politician so allegedly disinterested in taking anyone’s guns, Harris sure has a habit of trying to take a lot of guns away from a lot of people.

It’s not just that she previously supported seizing semi-automatic rifles from millions of peaceable law-abiding Americans through “mandatory buybacks” — support she only recently (and only slightly) walked back.

And it’s not just that she defended D.C.’s complete ban on the civilian possession of handguns and argued to the Supreme Court that none of us has a right to keep and bear any firearms in the first place.

And it’s not just that, in 2007, she threatened to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of San Francisco’s gun owners by sending police officers to conduct random, warrantless searches of their homes to ensure compliance with the city’s “safe storage” laws.

No, it’s because as San Francisco’s District Attorney, she co-sponsored a successful ballot measure that, but for a technicality of state law, would quite literally have taken handguns away from every lawful gun owner in the city.

The 2005 measure — titled Proposition H — prohibited not just future sales of handguns in the entire city of San Francisco, but outright banned handgun possession for anyone except active-duty law enforcement officers, licensed security guards, and members of the military. All nonexempt gun owners were required under the measure to surrender their once-legal handguns to police. And unlike the “mandatory buybacks” Harris proposed for so-called assault weapons, San Francisco’s handgun owners weren’t expected to be reimbursed for their confiscated property.

It gets worse.

Harris appears to have co-sponsored and supported this referendum knowing that it had virtually no capacity to lower crime rates in the city. Just one year later, while the city was still vigorously defending the measure against legal challenges, Harris admitted to journalists that “most crimes are committed using guns obtained illegally,” not by the lawful gun owners she chose to target.

She also knew that the measure was almost certain to be struck down by California courts, which had previously ruled against nearly identical measures as violating the state’s preemption laws.

She swears now that she’s not in favor of confiscating anyone’s guns.

Maybe it’s true.

Maybe she’s no longer the type of politician who’d waste obscene amounts of taxpayer money defending gun laws so extreme that even gun-control stalwarts like former Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (then San Francisco mayor) criticized them.

But that’s precisely who she has been during her career in public office.

And it’s entirely fair to question whether that’s who she might be again, should the opportunity arise.