Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris said during Tuesday’s debate with Republican Donald Trump that she owns a gun, a revelation that surprised some voters but also carried a deliberate political message.
A White House source said on Friday that Harris has a handgun for personal security reasons and it is kept in a secure location at her California home. The source declined to identify the brand of the gun, but said it is the same gun Harris mentioned during the 2019 election campaign.
Key quotes
“This issue of taking away everybody’s guns — Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking away anybody’s guns, so stop constantly lying about that,” Harris said Tuesday, referring to her fellow candidate Walz.
In 2019, Harris told reporters, “I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the same reason a lot of people do — for personal protection. I was a career prosecutor.”
Why it is important:
Harris, along with most members of her Democratic Party, has pushed for more gun safety legislation to curb the high rate of gun deaths and injuries in the U.S. Republicans blocking this legislation have argued that Democrats want to confiscate Americans’ guns and eliminate the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that gives Americans the right to “bear arms.”
Harris is trying to appeal to some of the one-third of Americans who own guns and some of the two-thirds of Americans who support stronger regulation of gun ownership.
Context
Harris has called for implementing universal background checks and expanding red flag laws to take guns away from people considered dangerous or unstable. She also wants to ban so-called assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
“I’m a good marksman,” Harris said during an on-stage interview with Politico in California in 2015. She was asked if she had ever fired a gun. “Yes, I have fired a gun a number of times,” she said, adding that it was a pistol.
According to a CNN report, Trump’s New York license to carry a concealed weapon was suspended in April 2023 following a criminal indictment against him. He returned two of the three pistols he owned and moved the third to Florida, according to the news outlet.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
