Vice President Kamala Harris is a gun owner. Apparently that is supposed to make other gun owners less leery of her stance on Second Amendment issues.

Just one problem: Harris is a gun owner who’s also an integral part of the most anti-gun administration in American history.

As President Joe Biden’s right-hand woman on gun control, she’s helped orchestrate a four-year war on the Second Amendment, including through unprecedented efforts to weaponize the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives against the peaceable gun owners whose trust she’s trying so desperately to garner.

In fairness, her actions as Biden’s gun-control czar appear downright moderate when contrasted with her lengthy history of extreme anti-Second Amendment advocacy and discourse. For example, in 2008 Harris joined an amicus brief defending bans on the possession of handguns and advocating for a 20th century revisionist view of the Second Amendment that renders it little more than a superfluous authorization of state National Guard units.

Harris has also previously voiced her support for “mandatory buybacks” (i.e., reimbursed confiscations) of guns owned by millions of peaceable Americans—a call she’s cynically walked back.

Perhaps Harris is just taking a cue from her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. While Harris is normally a straightforward, no-nonsense type of gun-control activist, Walz takes a more nuanced approach that, at first glance, may even come across as favorable toward the right to keep and bear arms.

It’s an image he fosters on purpose.

Walz repeatedly touts his status as a gun owner, his affinity for duck hunting and his National Guard service to lend credibility to his support of restrictive gun-control measures, as well as to dismiss off-hand any criticisms of how these laws might undermine the Second Amendment.

Walz’s track record as governor is one of misrepresenting reality to garner support for controversial gun-control laws.

Consider Walz’s response to a recent tragedy in which a man killed two police officers and a firefighter during a standoff at his home. Despite being prohibited from possessing firearms due to his lengthy history of criminal violence, the perpetrator obtained the guns via illegal straw purchases by his girlfriend.

Did Walz promise to take actions reasonably designed to stop criminals from evading the state’s universal background checks?

Of course not. Instead, he immediately pushed to expand the state’s “safe storage” laws, which play virtually no role in preventing violent crimes by people who can’t legally own guns in the first place.

Even if Walz were a bona fide combination of Rambo and Buffalo Bill, it wouldn’t make his desired policies any less unreasonable or constitutionally problematic.

If anything, Walz’s experience with firearms makes many of his positions even more concerning, precisely because they don’t come from a place of ignorance but of willful misrepresentation.

Take his views on the possession of certain semiautomatic rifles. He claims, based on his “authority” as a veteran, that these rifles are “weapons of war” that he carried into combat and that have no business on America’s streets.

Walz knows full well that the rifles he trained with in the National Guard had select-fire capabilities that render them functionally different from the semiautomatic civilian platforms he seeks to ban.

He knows, too, that the features distinguishing “assault weapons” from “non-assault weapons”—things like pistol grips and barrel shrouds—have no bearing on the weapon’s lethality or functionality, but rather make them safer and more practical for a variety of legitimate civilian uses, including for self-defense.

Harris and Walz can tout their status as gun owners and tip their hats in false homage to the right to keep and bear arms as often as they wish. It’s all subterfuge.

They’re still gunning for the Second Amendment.