Kamala Harris’ revelation at the most recent presidential debate that she is a gun owner caught some viewers by surprise – the vice president has said relatively little over the years about her personal experience of owning a firearm.
Responding to Donald Trump’s warning that Harris “wants to confiscate your guns,” the Democratic nominee fired back: “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away. So stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”
And Thursday night, Harris suggested to Oprah Winfrey at a virtual campaign event in Michigan that she would use her gun to protect herself from an intruder: “If someone breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”
Harris’ gun – which one source described as a pistol that could fit in a small purse – is securely stored inside her home in Los Angeles, an aide to the vice president told CNN. Harris had mentioned owning a firearm in 2019 during her unsuccessful presidential campaign – that gun, the aide said, is the same one she owns now. As vice president, Harris has mainly resided in Washington at the Naval Observatory, where she does not keep a second firearm.
Harris’ brief explanation four years ago for why she owned a gun was simple: self-protection.
“I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do – for personal safety,” Harris, then a California senator, told reporters in Iowa. “I was a career prosecutor.”
A longtime Harris associate based in California told CNN it was not unusual for prosecutors to own a firearm for self-protection, given the kinds of people and cases they often oversee in their jobs.
“Many prosecutors have personally been responsible for putting away very serious violent criminals. And unlike the cops who arrest them, prosecutors don’t necessarily have a job-issued firearm,” the associate said. “So it’s not uncommon for prosecutors to have protection at home.”
(Under California law, to buy a gun, a resident generally needs to obtain a firearm safety certificate and perform a safe handling demonstration with a certified instructor. The rules could be less strict for some law enforcement officers seeking to obtain a firearm.)
Harris’ office declined to share what year she first became a gun owner or any other details about the firearm and her ownership of it. The Harris campaign declined to comment for this story.
One adviser to Harris’ campaign could not recall the vice president – an outspoken proponent of gun safety measures, including an assault weapons ban – practicing scripted lines about her gun ownership prior to her debate with Trump. But the adviser told CNN that the biographical detail was a “good way for her to highlight that she respects the Second Amendment” – one of the most contentious issues in American politics.
“It protects her right to have a gun; Tim Walz’s right to have a gun. But she did not run from her values on assault rifles and assault weapons,” the adviser said.
As a prosecutor in California, Harris oversaw a number of cases involving violent crimes.
There was the infamous “scalping” case from the 1990s, when a man who scalped his girlfriend with a kitchen knife was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole after 12 years. “It is appropriate for what he did,” Harris, then an Alameda County deputy district attorney, said of Frankie Vanloock’s sentencing. “The manner in which this crime was committed was incredibly sadistic.”
Harris worked on countless child abuse cases, which she said in a 2003 interview “take a lot out of you” and described as being particularly difficult to prosecute because often, the only eyewitnesses are the victims themselves. In her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” she recalled one “quiet six-year-old girl” who was being molested by her 16-year-old brother.
“It was my job to sit with that sweet little child and see if I could get her to tell me her story – and whether she would be able to tell it again in front of a jury. I spent a lot of time with her, playing with toys, playing games, trying to build a relationship of trust,” Harris wrote. “But as much as I tried, I knew – I just knew – that there was no way she could articulate to a jury what she had suffered.”
Harris oversaw many other gruesome domestic violence and sex crime cases over the years that rocked local communities – the case of Francisco Ortiz, convicted in 2005 of killing his girlfriend and setting her body on fire; Frank Green, sentenced to 15 years to life in prison after being accused of violently beating, strangulating and throwing out from a six-story window his estranged girlfriend; and Dr. Jose Rosas, convicted of sexually assaulting three of his patients.
Trump, Harris’ Republican opponent, is also a self-proclaimed gun owner. But CNN reported in June that the New York City Police Department was preparing to revoke the former president’s license to carry a gun following his indictment on criminal charges in New York and that his concealed carry license was quietly suspended, while two of the three pistols he was licensed to carry were turned over to the NYPD earlier in the year.
Walz, the Minnesota governor and Harris’ running mate, is also a gun owner. With Trump and his vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, frequently attacking the Democratic ticket as being staunchly anti-Second Amendment, both Harris and Walz have sought to make the case that supporting the right to bear arms and gun safety laws are not mutually exclusive.
“I have personally prosecuted homicide cases. I have personally looked at autopsies. I have personally seen what assault weapons do to the human body, and so I feel very strongly that it is consistent with the Second Amendment and your right to own a gun to also say we need an assault weapons ban,” Harris said this week in an interview with Philadelphia TV station WPVI. “They’re literally tools of war.”
