Your support helps us to tell the story
Kamala Harris made an admission that may have surprised some viewers of the presidential debate against Donald Trump: she is a gun owner.
During Tuesday night’s debate, Trump accused Harris of having “a plan to confiscate everybody’s guns” if she is elected in November.
Responding to the false claim, the vice president said: “This business about taking everyone’s guns away – 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.”
Walz chimed in in a statement on X: “Kamala Harris and I are both gun owners. We’re not going to take away your Second Amendment rights – we’re going to prevent your kids from getting shot at school.”
Commentators also remarked on social media how possession of a firearm by a convicted felon is a federal crime, meaning Harris is legally allowed to own a gun but Trump, by law, is not.
“Not only are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz law-abiding gun owners, as she says, but Donald Trump has had his guns removed from his possession because he is a convicted felon,” Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin said in a post on X.
Another person said: “Fun Fact: Kamala Harris can own a gun. As a convicted felon, Donald Trump can’t.”
After Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records at his hush money trial earlier this year, ABC News reported that the NYPD would be revoking his gun license.
Harris’s revelation that she owns a gun is not new.
What Harris has previously said about owning a gun
The Democratic presidential nominee first revealed she has a firearm in 2019 while on the campaign trail for the 2020 presidential election.
Back then, a campaign aide confirmed to CNN that Harris owns a handgun, purchased a number of years ago, which she keeps locked up for safety.
The vice president said the gun was for “personal safety” because of her former role as a prosecutor.
“I am a gun owner and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do – for personal safety,” she said while speaking to journalists in Iowa. “I was a career prosecutor.”
She added: “We are being offered a false choice. You’re either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away. It’s a false choice that is born out of a lack of courage from leaders who must recognize and agree that there are some practical solutions to what is a clear problem in our country.”
Harris also told a crowd at the time, including members of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, about her plans for gun control. “We need reasonable gun safety laws in our country, including universal background checks and a renewal of the assault weapons ban,” she said.
Harris’s stance on gun control
Harris has repeatedly called for a new assault weapons ban, which would limit access to certain semi-automatic rifles commonly used in mass shootings.
The ban expired in 2004, one decade after it was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. It prohibits the sale of 19 specific models of firearms which have features of guns used by the military.
Last December, Senate Republicans blocked efforts by Senate Democrats to renew the ban, which included legislation on universal background checks Harris has previously called for.
Following the recent mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, Harris renewed her calls to end the “epidemic of gun violence” in the US.
“It’s senseless. It is. We’ve got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. You know, it doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said.
While attorney general in California in 2012, Harris seized more than 2,000 firearms from people legally barred from owning them, including those who were determined to be mentally unstable and anyone with active restraining orders.
As vice president, Harris has overseen the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Its priorities have been to address school shootings by focusing on stopping people in crisis, notably when it comes to mental health, and juveniles from accessing firearms.
Meanwhile, as president in 2017, Trump reversed an Obama-era regulation that had made it harder for people suffering from mental health issues to buy a gun.
His administration did ban bump stocks in 2017 in the aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre where the gunman used the accessory – which converts a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun.
However, the Supreme Court lifted the ban in June this year after a Texas gun shop owner challenged it. Trump appointed three of the conservative justices to the court.
