(CNN) – Kamala Harris’s revelation at the final presidential debate that she owns a gun caught some viewers by surprise: The vice president has said relatively little over the years about her personal experience as a gun owner.
Responding to Donald Trump’s warning that Harris “wants to confiscate your guns,” the Democratic candidate replied: “Tim Walz and I are gun owners. We’re not going to take away anyone’s guns. So stop lying about this stuff all the time.”
And on 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 anyone breaks into my house, I will shoot them.”
Harris’s gun, which one source described as a pistol that would fit in a small purse, is safely stored inside her Los Angeles home, an adviser to the vice president told CNN. Harris had mentioned owning a firearm in 2019 during her unsuccessful presidential campaign; that gun, the adviser said, is the same one she owns now. As vice president,
Harris has lived primarily in Washington, at the Naval Observatory, where he does not have a second firearm.
Harris’ brief explanation four years ago for why he owned a gun was simple: personal protection.
“I am a gun owner, and I own a gun probably for the reason a lot of people do: for personal safety,” Harris, then a senator from California, told reporters in Iowa. “I was a career prosecutor.”
A former Harris aide based in California told CNN that it was not unusual for prosecutors to possess a firearm for personal protection, given the types of people and cases they typically oversee in their work.
“Many prosecutors have been personally responsible for putting away very dangerous violent criminals. And unlike the police officers who arrest them, prosecutors don’t necessarily have a work-issued firearm,” the former aide said. “So it’s not uncommon for prosecutors to have protection at home.”
(Under California law, to purchase a gun, a resident generally needs to obtain a firearms safety certificate and complete a safe-handling demonstration with a certified instructor. The rules may be less strict for some law enforcement officers who wish to obtain a firearm.)
Harris’s office declined to share what year she first became a gun owner or any other details about the firearm and its ownership. Harris’s campaign declined to comment for this article.
An adviser to Harris’ campaign did not recall the vice president — an outspoken advocate of gun safety measures including banning assault weapons — rehearsing lines about her gun ownership before the debate with Trump. But the adviser told CNN the biographical detail was a “nice way to highlight her respect for the Second Amendment,” one of the most contentious issues in American politics.
“She’s protecting her right to own a gun; Tim Walz’s right to own a gun. But she didn’t run away from her values about assault rifles and assault weapons,” the aide said.
As a prosecutor in California, Harris oversaw several violent crime cases.
In the 1990s, there was the infamous “scalping” case, in which a man who scalped his girlfriend with a kitchen knife was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 12 years. “It’s an appropriate sentence for what he did,” Harris, then an Alameda County deputy district attorney, said of Frankie Vanloock’s conviction. “The way this crime was committed was incredibly sadistic.”
Harris worked on countless child abuse cases, which she said in a 2003 interview “get a lot of sting out of you” and described as especially difficult to prosecute because often the only eyewitnesses are the victims themselves. In her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” she recalls a “quiet six-year-old girl” who was being abused by her 16-year-old brother.
“My job was to sit down with this sweet little girl and see if I could get her to tell me her story, and if she would be able to retell it 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 try as I might, I knew there was no way she could articulate to a jury what she had endured.”
Over the years, Harris oversaw many other horrific cases of domestic violence and sexual crimes that shocked local communities: Francisco Ortiz, convicted in 2005 of killing his girlfriend and setting her on fire; Frank Green, sentenced to 15 years to life in prison after being accused of violently beating, strangling and throwing his estranged girlfriend from a sixth-story window; 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 Police Department was moving to revoke the former president’s gun license following his indictment on criminal charges in New York and that his concealed carry license was quietly suspended, while two of the three handguns he was licensed to carry were turned over to the NYPD earlier this year.
Walz, the Minnesota governor and Harris’ running mate, is also a gun owner. With Trump and his vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, frequently attacking the Democratic ticket for being staunchly anti-Second Amendment, both Harris and Walz have sought to make the case that support for gun rights and gun safety laws are not mutually exclusive.
“I have personally handled homicide cases. I have personally seen autopsies. I have personally seen what assault weapons do to the human body, and so I firmly believe that it is consistent with the Second Amendment and your right to own a gun to also say that we need an assault weapons ban,” Harris said this week in an interview with Philadelphia television station WPVI. “They are literally instruments of war.”
