The exchange, during a livestreamed town hall with Oprah Winfrey and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, began with the kind of emotional scene that has become a somber staple for Democrats campaigning on gun safety.
Video was released from the scene of the school shooting. A teenage girl was in the audience with a gunshot wound, her wrist and arm bandaged. Her mother was crying and speaking directly to Harris, imploring those in power to change things.
But then, after Oprah Winfrey, a campaign adviser, changed the subject to Harris’ gun ownership, the vice president opted for a completely different kind of message.
“If someone breaks into my house,” Harris said, his voice cracking with laughter, “they’re going to get shot.”
It was a remarkable statement from a typically guarded candidate, who immediately expressed regret. As Oprah tried to respond, “I hear that, I hear that,” she said, Harris admitted she “probably shouldn’t have said that” and joked that her aides would correct her comment.
“My staff will take care of it later,” Harris said, still laughing.
But it also underscored his party’s growing comfort with the country’s gun culture, even as it campaigns against its dangers — and how Harris is taking advantage of it in the narrow window she has to run in a country that has never elected a woman president.
“That’s what I mean, Oprah,” Harris said. “I’m not trying to take away everybody’s guns.”
Guns and the presidency have been closely linked for much of American history. You can buy a replica of one of George Washington’s flintlock pistols for $156.99 at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum — and the Smithsonian has one of the originals. When Barack Obama was president, the White House made a point of showing off his love of skeet shooting at Camp David.
But in recent years, it has typically been Democratic men in Republican states — not Democratic women in California — who have made guns a secondary focus of their political campaigns.
In a 2010 campaign ad, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia fired a shotgun at a copy of the cap-and-trade bill, an environmental measure that would have curbed emissions (he was running as a Democrat but has since become an independent). In 2016, Jason Kander, a Missouri Democrat then running for the U.S. Senate, assembled an AR-15 blindfolded, daring Republican incumbent Roy Blunt to do the same. And in 2018, Democrat Jared Golden shot a bullseye in a campaign ad for his successful bid for a congressional district in Maine.
None of them, however, threatened in these ads to shoot a real person with their gun.
Harris’s remarks, which seemed off-the-cuff from a candidate who said this week that she chooses her words carefully, come at a time when she is struggling to present herself as a strong woman in a campaign against a male opponent who cares deeply about his own image of strength. Her campaign ads and speeches have evoked her years as a prosecutor who arrested transnational killers and gangs, and they have promised new security measures at the border.
Her identity as a local district attorney, which during her 2019 presidential campaign led progressives to dismiss her by saying, “Kamala is a cop,” has become a central part of her argument for the presidency.
Her gun quickly became part of that image, though she has spoken relatively little about it. She told reporters in 2019 that she kept it for personal safety; a campaign official said it was now in a secure location at her home in California. It’s unclear exactly when she bought it, or whether a specific episode or threat prompted the purchase.
What is clear is that Harris’ gun has become a symbol of a candidate trying to upend preconceived notions of what a president should be and what Democrats stand for.
The female politicians who have become most closely associated with guns in recent years tend to be Republicans like Sarah Palin or Kari Lake, the Arizona Senate candidate who posted photos of herself with a gun on social media and urged her supporters to arm themselves for the election.
The other three presidential candidates, all men, have also expressed an interest in guns. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s penchant for hunting was practically the first thing Harris’ campaign revealed to the nation about her. When Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio accepted his nomination for vice president, he talked about finding his grandmother’s 19 loaded pistols, and last year, as the country was obsessed with Chinese spy balloons, he posted a photo of himself looking skyward while holding a rifle.
Last year, Trump visited a gun store and said he wanted to buy a gun — though his criminal charges have raised legal questions about such a sale. My colleagues reported over the summer that the New York Police Department was seeking to revoke his concealed-carry permit after he was convicted on 34 counts.
Harris has tried to make the idea of a woman president seem normal. Perhaps her gun talk is a way of presenting herself as not so different from the men she runs with and against, and the men she wants to follow into the presidency.
the moment
Watching the crowd
Our photographers are on the road with the presidential candidates all the time, and I use this space to highlight one image each week. Tonight, we’re looking at a photo taken by Kenny Holston in Greensboro, North Carolina, last week. I spoke with Kenny today, and he explained what struck him about a photograph that captures members of a group Harris must succeed with: black men.
These men were so excited that it didn’t take them long to start clapping. You could tell they had come with such energy. It wasn’t so much Harris who was getting the crowd going, it was the other way around. They were getting the crowd going.
An impressive number of black supporters showed up at this rally, more than I usually see when I cover President Biden’s rallies. These men had come a long way to get to the front row, they really wanted to be a part of the action that was unfolding. They were hanging on every word she said.
It was one of those moments that every photographer dreams of, where your subjects are so engaged in what they’re doing that they sort of forget there are photographers there.
— Kenny Holston
