By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at a State Department luncheon attended by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, acknowledged mass shootings in the U.S., declaring, “And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way — as our friends in Australia have demonstrated,” according to Fox News.
But in her zeal to applaud Australia’s strict gun control, the vice president appears to have overlooked the obvious. Australia has no constitutional protection for owing firearms, unlike the U.S. where the Second Amendment remains a cornerstone of the Constitution.
According to the official website of the Australian Parliament, “in contrast to the position in the United States, there is no legal right to gun ownership. Owning and using a firearm is limited in Australia to people who have a genuine reason and self-protection does not constitute a genuine reason to possess, own or use a firearm.”
Harris is not the first anti-gunner to suggest the U.S. should mimic Australian gun control. When she was running for the presidency in 2015, Hillary Clinton touted that country’s mandatory gun buyback scheme following a mass shooting in 1996.
“The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns, and then they basically clamped down going forward in terms of having, you know, more of a background-check approach, more of a permitting approach,” Clinton said at the time, according to The Hill.
Then, as now, the two Democrats forget the ownership of firearms in this country is protected by the constitution. There is nothing in the Second Amendment limiting the type of arms or allowing any arms to be banned. It simply says the “right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the “militia clause”—the first part of the Second Amendment’s wording—is a “prefatory clause.” The “operative clause” explains the right and says it shall not be infringed.
Australia’s mandatory gun buyback has been dubbed “compensated confiscation.” That Harris and Clinton, among others, have suggested the Australian approach to gun regulation is a good idea is telling. Critics contend Harris, along with President Joe Biden and others, are exploiting the mass shooting incident in Lewiston, Maine this week to push for stricter gun control laws and even gun bans.
Among the harshest criticisms so far is a statement from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which called out Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Asserting that Biden and Newsom “have predictably reacted like vultures,” CCRKBA said both men are only interested in pushing an agenda which may, or may not, have any bearing on the Maine attack.
“Gov. Newsom is demanding adoption of a waiting period in Maine,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “and President Biden wants ‘universal background checks’ and safe storage laws, and both of them know none of these proposals would have prevented what happened Wednesday evening. They’ve pounced like craven political opportunists in hopes of using this tragedy to stir up public emotions in an effort to push gun restrictions they’ve been promoting for years.
“Biden has wanted to ban semiautomatic rifles for years,” Gottlieb continued, “when he knows rifles of any kind are involved in a fraction of murders, and he also knows there are millions of law-abiding owners of such firearms who have harmed nobody. Why should honest citizens be penalized for the rampage of one clearly disturbed individual with documented mental health issues?
“The president also wants to repeal the federal law protecting gun manufacturers from junk lawsuits,” he added, “which has absolutely nothing to do with this case and he knows it. Joe Biden is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, which is what anti-gunners do every time there is a tragedy upon which they might capitalize. It is a disgusting process we have seen time and again.”
