Kamala Harris is leaning right into a little-known side of her biography – the truth that she is a gun proprietor – to stake out floor on the difficulty of firearms management.
The Democratic presidential nominee helps common background checks, so-called “crimson flag” legal guidelines and a ban on assault weapons, however critics are honing in on her previous assist for a compulsory buyback of semi-automatic rifles.
After Donald Trump claimed throughout their Tuesday debate she would “confiscate all people’s gun” if elected, Harris replied that each she and working mate Tim Walz personal weapons.
“We’re not taking anybody’s weapons away, so cease with the continual mendacity about these things,” she mentioned.
Gun management stays among the many most contentious points in American politics however has largely taken a backseat to different coverage areas this election.
The query raised throughout Tuesday’s debate over the place precisely Harris stands was the primary time the difficulty has even come up in a 2024 debate.
Moderator Linsey Davis famous that, amongst different shifting coverage positions, Harris not backs a programme that will pressure gun homeowners handy over their AR-15s and different assault-style weapons to the federal government.
Harris reiterated her stance at a rally on Thursday in North Carolina. “We who imagine within the freedom to dwell protected from gun violence will lastly go an assault weapons ban, common background checks, and crimson flag legal guidelines”.
Gun buybacks
Gun buyback proposals gained steam throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential main race, first endorsed by Eric Swalwell and incomes assist from Harris, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders and – most memorably – Beto O’Rourke.
“We’ve to have a buyback programme, and I assist a compulsory gun buyback programme,” Harris mentioned in October 2019.
“It is acquired to be good, we acquired to do it the fitting method. However there are 5 million [assault weapons] at the least, some estimate as many as 10 million, and we’re going to need to have good public coverage that’s about taking these off the streets, however doing it the fitting method.”
Buyback initiatives have taken place in cities throughout the US since at the least the Seventies, although research indicates that they’re usually very costly and never efficient as a standalone technique to curb gun violence.
Advocates, nevertheless, level to the influence of two obligatory buybacks in Australia following the deadliest mass capturing on its soil in 1996. The nation has largely averted mass firearm violence since that incident.
In making her personal case for buybacks as a part of a broader effort to rein in gun violence, Harris defined again in 2019: “I’m a gun proprietor, and I personal a gun for in all probability the explanation lots of people do – for private security. I used to be a profession prosecutor.”
She argued US politicians have been providing American voters “a false selection” between defending gun rights beneath the Second Modification and taking weapons away.
“It is a false selection that’s borne out of a scarcity of braveness from leaders who should recognise and agree that there are some sensible options to what’s a transparent downside in our nation,” she mentioned.
Harris’s expertise
Harris started her profession because the district lawyer – or the highest prosecutor – in Alameda County after which for the town of San Francisco. She additionally served from 2011 to 2017 as California’s lawyer basic, the highest regulation enforcement job within the state.
William Lockyer, a fellow Democrat who served as California AG from 1999 to 2007, instructed the BBC that it was not unusual for a neighborhood or state-level prosecutor to personal a gun, though the function comes with its personal safety workforce.
“I don’t learn about Kamala’s expertise as AG, however I acquired a menace on common each day throughout my eight years,” he mentioned.
Harris in a roundabout way clarify on Tuesday both why she acquired a weapon or why she not helps the concept of a compulsory gun buyback by the federal authorities.
The Harris marketing campaign didn’t reply to the BBC’s request for remark.
It’s uncommon for elected officers within the get together to talk brazenly about their expertise as gun homeowners.
Walz the hunter
Harris’s vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, is a notable exception.
Walz, from Nebraska, grew up looking throughout summer season breaks and skilled with firearms over the greater than 20 years he spent as a Nationwide Guardsman.
At first of his political profession, he held an A score from the Nationwide Rifle Affiliation and was usually noticed sporting an NRA ballcap.
However Walz modified tack amid a sequence of lethal shootings throughout the 2010s, together with at colleges in Sandy Hook, Connecticut and Parkland, Florida.
He held an F score by the point he left Congress and, as Minnesota governor, he signed expansions of background checks and different restrictions into regulation.
“I do know weapons,” he mentioned on the Democratic Nationwide Conference final month.
“I am a veteran. I am a hunter. I used to be a greater shot than most Republicans in Congress and I’ve the trophies to show it. However I am additionally a dad.
“I imagine within the Second Modification, however I additionally imagine that our first accountability is to maintain our children protected.”
On the Republican facet, Trump has referred to himself as ”the most effective buddy gun homeowners have ever had within the White Home”.
Talking to NRA members in February, he bragged that he “did nothing” regardless of stress to take motion after shootings and pledged “nobody will lay a finger in your firearms” if he’s re-elected.
Trump’s document
As a New York resident, Donald Trump owned three licenced firearms, two of which he surrendered in 2023 following his arrest on 34 counts of falsifying enterprise data.
The third weapon is alleged to have been legally transferred to Florida, the state the place he now lives.
His felony conviction in New York required that his gun licence there be revoked.
Convicted criminals are barred beneath federal regulation from proudly owning weapons or ammunition, however authorities in Republican-led Florida have expressed little interest in confiscating his weapon.
Trump as soon as claimed in an interview that he “at all times” carried a gun. Underneath Florida regulation, he can carry his firearm hid and doesn’t want a allow.
The Trump marketing campaign has additionally mentioned his assist for gun rights was unshaken by the try on his life this July, when a 20-year-old armed along with his father’s AR-style rifle shot at the least eight rounds in his course and grazed his proper ear with a bullet.
JD Vance, his working mate and a former Marine, has described capturing weapons from an early age and was lauded earlier this 12 months for his “excellent voting document” on defending the Second Modification by the pro-gun group, Gun House owners of America.