Kamala Harris’s handlers are scrambling full-time to cover for her comment to Oprah Winfrey this last Thursday that she is a gun owner and “if somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”  Then she added, “My staff will deal with that later,” which pointed to an immediate recognition that she had gone beyond her normal word salad practice and had said something truly controversial.  Along with all of her flips on major issues, we really don’t know if she is a true 2nd amendment–supporter.

Kamala’s carefully scripted public moments along with her meandering answers to specific questions, which leave everybody wondering just what she said, are most likely a planned strategy to keep her on the “joyful” and empty path to the presidency.  But this comment takes the cake.  Her staff is most likely going to “deal with that” by taking away her gun — kind of like taking away poor Joe’s keys.

Winfrey replied, “I hear that, I hear that,” but we don’t know if she meant that she was in agreement with the off-script comment or if Oprah was saying, “I hear what I really don’t want to be hearing!”  I doubt if the audience felt “the joy rising” with that exchange.

Kamala’s comment about owning a gun and being ready to use it on an intruder has raised a firestorm of comments in the press and on social media.  Those on the left are attempting to “put in context” what she said and doubt that she was being serious (after all, she laughed), and those on the right are bringing up previous statements and multiple videos of Kamala calling for gun control and the confiscation (“buy-back”) of assault rifles. Most of this back and forth is the din of battle during a heated campaign, but Kamala herself has said that her values have not changed.

Kamala has made much of her past as a prosecuting attorney in San Francisco and then as the state’s attorney general.  It would seem that she should be familiar at least with California’s law concerning the use of firearms with a home intruder.  In the People’s Republic of California, one can use deadly force in a home only if he “reasonably” fears great bodily injury or death.  In California, you don’t simply shoot intruders.  And if Kamala were to do that in San Francisco or Los Angeles, with the D.A.s in her own tradition who are running the show, she would be in bad trouble, even if she “thought” she was in danger.  So much for her “experience” as a prosecutor.

One small piece of Kamala’s history is quite educational in taking the veil off.  As district attorney of San Francisco, Harris helped draft a new bill that was signed into law by then–San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom.  The bill included requirements for inventory of sales by legal gun-sellers, banned the possession of guns in public housing, and included Harris’s provisions for safe gun storage.  Newsom would then crow that “San Francisco now has the strictest anti-gun laws in the country.”  Many of these same provisions, and even stricter ones, have now been enshrined in California state law.

A video recently surfaced of an event in May of 2007 with Kamala promoting the new San Francisco gun law.  In the somewhat grainy video, standing behind her seems to be the future governor of all things progressive.  In front of a Baptist church, Kamala goes beyond her disdain of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution and shows complete ignorance of the 4th.

Kamala states that in the context of “responsible behaviors among everybody in the community,” “just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we are not going to walk into that home and check to see if you are being responsible and safe in the way that you conduct your affair[s].”

One would think that for an attorney and graduate of law school, the most basic rights guaranteed under the Constitution would be part of Kamala’s panoply of legal knowledge: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated[.]”  It looks as though, for Kamala, the “effects” that are guaranteed against unreasonable searches do not include guns.

In the end, it’s Kamala’s laugh when she made the comment with Oprah that most caught my attention.  I have to be fair — these days, Kamala laughs about almost anything she says.  (In the above mentioned video, she stares steely-eyed at the public with the proper seriousness of a district attorney.)  Even Kamala’s oft-repeated promise of a new “opportunity economy” mostly comes with a laugh, which simply underlines that her understanding of true economics is laughable.

But I do have a certain understanding of Kamala’s laugh.  I have a daughter who has a similar type of nervous laugh, although nothing of the word salads.  My daughter has mostly brought her laugh under some kind of control as she has reached a half-century in age, but she is known both for her joyful character and her huge laughs when nobody else is laughing.

Some years back, my daughter took a course in Israeli Krav Maga for self-defense.  She is quite athletic and did well in the course, but her instructor kept having to tell her, “When you hit someone, you are not supposed to laugh!”

This makes me ask: when Kamala shoots that intruder, will she be laughing?

Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).

Image: Mobilus In Mobili via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).