On October 9, 2024, the New York Times presented Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s magazine-fed, semiautomatic Glock as a medium through which she can appeal to American gun owners. The outlet did not mention that a rule Harris backed and enforced as Attorney General of California barred the sale of almost every type of Glock in the Golden State.
Harris first admitted she owned a gun in 2019, during her unsuccessful primary run for the Democrat presidential nomination.
Breitbart News reported that Harris again addressed the topic on Monday of this week, telling 60 Minutes that the gun she owns is a Glock.
The NYT reacted to this news by saying, “If Ms. Harris wanted to appeal to a broad swath of American gun owners, she couldn’t have picked a better brand.”
“That the gun [Glock] has been a favorite of the country’s police forces for more than three decades helps account for its dominance in the popular imagination,” the Times added.
The magazine-fed, semiautomatic Glock pistol, which is made in Austria and began to be imported into the United States in the 1980s, is certainly ubiquitous among American gun owners. However, the NYT fails to point out that Harris’s support for gun control that banned many Glocks from being sold in California is well-known too.
On October 9, 2024, Breitbart News noted that Glocks have now gone through five iterations, referred to as “generations,” and only one of those generations is legal to sell in California.
The earliest Glocks were generation 1, followed, with certain upgrades or enhancements, by generation 2, and so forth, all the way to today’s Glock, which is generation 5. All of the Glocks, regardless of generation, are banned for sale in California except for Generation 3, which was grandfathered in when California’s “Unsafe Handgun Act” was adopted.
Except for those Glocks that were grandfathered in, attorney Kostas Moros explained the state of California does not allow sale of the pistols, as they consider them “unsafe handguns” because they lack “a compliant chamber load indicator, lack a magazine disconnect mechanism, and until our lawsuit caused California to repeal the requirement, of course lacked microstamping.” (It should be noted that microstamping was not one of the requirements for approved handguns in California until enforceded by that state’s Attorney General, Kamala Harris, in 2013.)
Harris, a former DA of San Francisco and Attorney General of California, was considered part of law enforcement and therefore not bound by the restrictions faced by commoners. Her law enforcement status meant that she could buy any Glock, even those that hardworking, salt-of-the-earth California residents were/are prohibited from buying for defense of themselves and their families.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, a Pulsar Night Vision pro-staffer, and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly:
