Wait, Kamala Harris owns a gun?

Vice President Kamala Harris had a quick comeback for Donald Trump when he accused her of wanting to take people’s guns away at Tuesday’s debate.

“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,” Harris said.

While the remark caught attention online, it wasn’t actually news. Harris had spoken about being a gun owner during her last campaign for president. “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 after a campaign event in 2019. 

At the time, Harris pointed to her career as a prosecutor by way of explanation. It’s not unusual for people who work in law enforcement, from parole officers to police to chief law enforcement officers, to own a gun out of concern that someone they’ve encountered in the legal system might try to exact revenge — as has happened before. The surprise is almost certainly for another reason altogether: Harris is a multiracial woman from a liberal state who has called for banning assault weapons and passing universal background checks.

But this shouldn’t be all that shocking, either. As I wrote in my feature last month about the millions of Americans who decided to buy their first guns during the pandemic, women — particularly Black and Hispanic women — are among the fastest growing cohort of gun owners in the country. 

Between 1980 and 2014, only 9 to 14 percent of women owned guns. But half of first-time gun buyers between 2019 and 2021 were women, according to a study from Northeastern University. Another study of new gun owners found that, from 2020 to 2022, 69 percent were people of color. As of last year, more than half of Americans said they or someone in their household had a gun.

Harris is right that the vast majority of gun owners say they own a gun for protection, and the fact that she counts herself among the millions of Americans who own guns reveals an important truth that often gets hidden. While the national debate is typically framed as a fight between two opposing interests — anti-gun liberals who want to take everyone’s guns away and pro-gun conservatives who steadfastly refuse any regulation — the reality is much more nuanced. 

It’s true that support for measures like banning assault weapons is mixed. But the notion that all gun owners are totally against any gun regulation is clearly false and a narrative that gun control advocates have been working to unravel.

It’s not just that a majority of Americans say it’s too easy to get a gun and regulations should be stricter. Even a majority of American gun owners say they support things like universal background checks, permits, and extreme risk laws meant to keep guns away from domestic abusers and others likely to commit violence. 

In interviews I’ve done with gun control activists and in other news articles, these advocates highlight the gun owners in their midst who are fighting for stronger gun laws. It’s not just urban and coastal liberals and people who’ve never owned guns before who want to see better regulation, but a wide range of Americans.

Harris understands this dynamic well. “We are being offered a false choice,” she said in 2019. “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.”

She’s right, of course. As the polls show, millions of Americans own guns and have complicated feelings about them. It’s only the people who don’t want to see any regulation who have an interest in pretending otherwise.