While Second Amendment advocates are frustrated by Kamala Harris’s efforts to camouflage her anti-gun extremism with her claims of gun ownership, some gun control advocates aren’t thrilled with her strategy to court the vote of undecided gun-owning voters. Instead, they want to see her proclaim that owning a gun is dangerous and a bad idea.
The Bloomberg-backed gun control “news” site The Trace recently spoke to several pro-gun control academics who are fretting to varying degrees over Harris’s Glock talk on the campaign trail.
Vice President Kamala Harris has touted her gun ownership in several media appearances over the past month, telling Oprah Winfrey that if someone breaks into Harris’s house, “they’re getting shot.” Most recently, in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on October 7, Harris said she owns a Glock pistol and has practiced with it at a shooting range.
Harris’s remarks appear to be aimed at swaying undecided right-leaning voters ahead of the presidential election. In doing so, however, she seems to have embraced a popular firearm industry assumption unsupported by the vast majority of scientific evidence: that the best way to guarantee your safety is to keep a gun in the home.
“There is plenty of research going back to the early 90s showing that when you own a gun, it increases your risk dramatically for homicide, suicide, and unintentional injury with a firearm,” said Daniel Semenza, a Rutgers University criminologist who is studying defensive gun use. “I think Harris has really missed an opportunity to signal to voters that she has taken this risk assessment seriously.”
The only signal Harris is trying to give to voters is that she’s not a gun grabber, and given her extensive history of supporting extreme anti-2A measures like a complete prohibition on handgun ownership, she’s got her work cut out for her. Somewhat surprisingly, while major media outlets like CBS have ignored Harris’s backing of handgun bans, The Trace actually brought up her past advocacy for banning the most commonly owned firearms in the country.
Twice she supported legislation to ban civilians from purchasing the same weapon she owns — once in San Francisco while serving as the city’s district attorney, and once as part of an amicus brief in the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court case. Both measures targeted handguns because of their widespread use in city gun crime, giving little consideration to their utility in self-defense scenarios.
Semenza, the Rutgers professor who is also a director at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, said the risks associated with gun ownership should not dissuade every prospective gun owner from buying a firearm, but that “each person has to take into account their profession, their lifestyle, their storage practices, their past experiences.”
“The point is to take the buying decision seriously,” he said.
No, their point is to discourage Americans from exercising their right to keep and bear arms through draconian gun laws, a Gordian knot of red tape, and attempts to denormalize and demonize gun owners.
In that respect, Harris’s talk about owning a Glock isn’t helpful, even if she’d be a rubber stamp for their anti-2A policies if she’s elected. But if Harris thought that her support for handgun bans and mandatory “buybacks” of so-called assault weapons would benefit her campaign, she wouldn’t be running away from those positions and refusing to say whether or not she still believes banning pistols wouldn’t infringe on our Second Amendment rights.
Harris’s campaign strategy isn’t just frustrating to gun control activists because of what she’s saying. It’s because it demonstrates that despite decades of work, they haven’t succeeded in demonizing gun ownership. Quite the opposite. Millions of Americans have purchased firearms for the first time over the past couple of years, and even 41% of Democrats say they live in a home where firearms are stored, according to a 2023 survey from NBC News/Wall St. Journal. That’s an 8 point increase from 2019, and it shows the anti-gunners are losing ground in the court of public opinion, even among their base of supporters.
Oddly enough, though Second Amendment advocates and anti-gun activists don’t agree on much, there are folks in both camps who would prefer Kamala Harris talk openly and honestly about her support for handgun bans and a collective rights view of the Second Amendment, though for very different reasons. If Harris wins election, however, the anti-gunners won’t lose any sleep over her claims of owning a Glock. They’ll be too busy working with her to infringe on our right to keep and bear arms to care about her rhetoric on the campaign trail.
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