The exchange, during a live-streamed forum with Oprah Winfrey and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, began with the kind of emotional set piece that has become a grim go-to for Democrats campaigning on gun safety.
There was a video about the terror of a school shooting. A teenage gunshot victim in the audience with bandages on her wrist and arm. Her tearful mother speaks directly to Harris and implores those in power to make a change.
But then, after Winfrey, a campaign surrogate, changed the subject to Harris’ gun ownership, the vice president reached for a different kind of message entirely.
“If someone breaks in my house,” Harris said, as her voice broke into a laugh, “they’re getting shot.”
It was a remarkable utterance from a generally guarded candidate who expressed immediate regret. As Oprah tried to Oprah — “I hear that, I hear that,” she said — Harris admitted that she “probably should not have said that,” and joked that her aides would clean up her comment.
“My staff will deal with that later,” Harris said, still laughing.
But it also underscored her party’s increasing comfort with the country’s gun culture even as it campaigns against its dangers — and how Harris is seizing on it in the slim window she has to introduce herself to a country that has never elected a woman as president.
“Here’s my point, Oprah,” Harris said. “I’m not trying to take everyone’s guns away.”
Guns and the presidency have gone hand in hand 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 that he enjoyed skeet shooting at Camp David.
But in recent years, it has generally been male Democrats from red states — not female ones from California — who have made guns a supporting character in their political campaigns.
In a 2010 campaign ad, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia shot a copy of the cap-and-trade bill, an environmental measure that would have limited emissions, with a rifle (he was running as a Democrat but has since become an independent). In 2016, Jason Kander, a Missouri Democrat who was then running for U.S. Senate, assembled an AR-15 while blindfolded, daring the incumbent Republican, Roy Blunt, to do the same. And in 2018, Democrat Jared Golden shot a bull’s-eye in a campaign ad for his successful run for a swing congressional district in Maine.
None of them, however, threatened in those ads to shoot an actual person with their gun.
Harris’ comment — an ostensibly off-the-cuff moment from a candidate who spoke just this week about choosing her words carefully — came at a time when she is working hard to portray herself as tough in a campaign against a male opponent who cares deeply about his own image of strength. Her campaign ads and speeches linger on her years as a prosecutor who locked up killers and transnational gangs, and they promise 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’s a cop,” has become a central part of her argument for the presidency.
Her gun has quickly become part of that image, even though she has said 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 is not clear exactly when she bought it, or if a specific episode or threat prompted the purchase.
What is clear is that Harris’ gun has become a symbol for a candidate who is trying to upend preconceived notions about who a president should be, and what Democrats represent.
The female politicians who have most closely associated themselves with guns in recent years have tended to be Republicans including Sarah Palin or Kari Lake, the Arizona Senate candidate who has posted pictures of herself with a gun on social media and urged supporters to arm themselves for the election.
The three other candidates atop the presidential ticket, all men, have telegraphed their interest in guns, too. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota’s penchant for hunting was practically the first thing the Harris campaign told the nation about him. When Sen. JD Vance of Ohio accepted his nomination as vice president, he spoke of finding his grandmother’s 19 loaded handguns, and last year, when the country was obsessing over Chinese spy balloons, he posted a photo of himself peering skyward while holding a rifle.
Former President Donald Trump visited a gun store last year and said he wanted to buy a firearm — though his criminal indictments raised legal questions about such a sale. The Times reported over the summer that the New York Police Department was seeking to revoke his concealed carry permit after he was convicted on 34 felony charges.
Harris has been trying to make the idea of a female president seem like nothing unusual. Her talk about her gun may be a way of portraying herself as not so different from the men she is running with and against, and those she is running to follow into the presidency.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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