Kamala Harris Says She Is A Gun Owner At Debate
Vice President Kamala Harris batted away former President Donald Trump’s insistence that she would support widespread gun confiscation at Tuesday night’s debate.
In a freewheeling tirade about crime, immigration and fracking, Trump lashed out at Harris as a “radical left liberal.”
“She wants to confiscate your guns and she will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania,” Trump said.
“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” Harris said toward the end of the debate, referring to her running mate, the Minnesota governor. “We’re not taking anyone’s guns away.”
The unexpected comment from Harris, who has rarely discussed her personal firearm ownership, marked the only major exchange about gun policy over the course of the 90-minute debate.
Harris acknowledged owning a handgun during her 2019 presidential bid.
“I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do — for personal safety,” Harris told reporters in Des Moines, Iowa, five years ago. “I was a career prosecutor.”
A campaign aide told CNN at the time that Harris kept the firearm locked in her home.
During the 2019 campaign, Harris also voiced support for a government buyback program aimed at reducing the number of semi-automatic rifles in circulation. Her current platform supports reenacting a federal assault weapons ban, though it does not call for buybacks.
Some 28.1 million firearms fitting the rough definition of “assault weapons” are circulating in the United States, according to production figures compiled by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a spokesperson for the group told HuffPost last month.
Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, is a veteran and hunter who has more publicly discussed his gun ownership and marksmanship.
Trump, on the other hand, can no longer legally possess firearms or ammunition due to his felony convictions for 34 counts of falsifying business records in the state of New York.
He owned at least three handguns at the time of his convictions and has surrendered at least two of them.
