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.
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.
That is, in fact, what happened two years later. The California Court of Appeals ultimately ordered the city to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to the pro-Second Amendment groups that successfully fought Proposition H. In other words, at an earlier time in her career, Harris was willing to waste all that money waging gun control wars even when she knew the restrictions were both unlawful and unhelpful.
