Vice President Kamala Harris surprised many viewers during Tuesday’s presidential debate when she mentioned, almost in passing, this tidbit: She’s a gun owner.
Ms. Harris defended her Second Amendment position after former President Donald Trump suggested she was a radical who wanted to confiscate Americans’ guns.
“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away,” Ms. Harris said, referring to her running mate, the governor of Minnesota. “So stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”
While Mr. Walz speaks openly about being an avid hunter, Ms. Harris’s acknowledgment had online commenters saying: Wait, what?
Yet Ms. Harris also spoke about her gun ownership in 2019 during her presidential bid.
“I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do — for personal safety,” she said at the time. “I was a career prosecutor.”
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Ms. Harris rose through the political ranks as a district attorney in San Francisco before becoming California attorney general, then a U.S. senator.
At the time of her presidential bid five years ago, a Harris aide told CNN the weapon was a handgun bought years before and locked up responsibly.
The Washington Times reached out to the Harris campaign on Wednesday for information about the type of gun Ms. Harris owns and where it’s stored.
During that first presidential run, Ms. Harris supported a mandatory buyback program for military-style, or so-called assault, weapons.
The Harris campaign has moved off that position during this cycle, with aides telling multiple outlets she’s not pushing for a mandatory buyback.
Ms. Harris has called for universal background checks, red flag laws that take away guns from potentially dangerous people. She also wants a general ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, though her campaign policy page doesn’t say whether that would include confiscation of existing guns in circulation. A ban could apply only to future sales.
Mr. Trump says Ms. Harris is a radical at heart and will pivot back to her harsher stances over public safety, firearms and energy.
“She has a plan to defund the police. She has a plan to confiscate everybody’s gun,” he said at Tuesday’s debate. “She has a plan to not allow fracking in Pennsylvania or anywhere else.”
Mr. Trump’s words were aimed at gun owners and centrist voters.
Yet another block of voters — staunch liberals — might have noticed Ms. Harris’ aside about firearms.
Peter Funt, the former host and producer of “Candid Camera,” penned an op-ed in 2019 taking issue with Ms. Harris’ gun ownership.
“This underpublicized revelation comes as Harris is getting a lot of ink for being tough about guns,” Mr. Funt wrote in USA Today. “Her words are fine, but for a progressive like me, they are undermined by that handgun. And I can’t be the only one who is disturbed. Keeping a handgun for personal safety is a bedrock conservative view.”
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, said it was interesting that Ms. Harris brought up her gun ownership “eight weeks before the election when she needs to appeal to gun owners who know she has supported legislation to confiscate guns.”
“Kamala can’t be trusted,” Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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