Kamala Harris tells Oprah they’ll ‘get shot’ if someone breaks into her house – DNyuz

The exchange, during a livestreamed forum with Oprah Winfrey and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, began with the kind of emotional scene that has become a grim standard for Democrats campaigning on gun safety.

There was a video of the terror of a school shooting. A teenage victim of a crowd-sourced shooting with bandages on her wrist and arm. Her mother crying, speaking directly to Harris, begging those in power to make change.

But when Winfrey, a campaign manager, changed the subject to Harris’ own gun ownership, the vice president opted for a very different message.

“If someone breaks into my house,” Harris said, her voice breaking into laughter, “they get shot.”

It was a remarkable statement from a generally reserved candidate who immediately expressed regret. While Oprah tried to Oprah — “I hear that, I hear that,” she said — Harris admitted that she “probably shouldn’t have said that,” and joked that her aides would clean up her comment.

“My staff will deal with that later,” Harris said, still laughing.

But it also underscored her party’s growing comfort with the country’s gun culture, even as she campaigns against its dangers. And how Harris is using that in the short time she has to introduce herself to a country that has never elected a woman president.

“Here’s my point, Oprah,” Harris said. “I’m not trying to take away everybody’s guns.”

Guns and the presidency have gone hand in hand throughout American history. You can buy a replica of one of George Washington’s flintlock pistols for $156.99 at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum — and the Smithsonian has one of the originals. When Barack Obama was president, the White House made a point of showing off his love of clay pigeon shooting at Camp David.

But in recent years, it has generally been male Democrats in Republican states (rather than female Democrats in California) who have made guns a supporting player in their political campaigns.

In a 2010 campaign ad, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia shot a copy of the cap-and-trade bill, an environmental measure that would have curbed emissions, with a rifle (he ran as a Democrat but is now an independent). In 2016, Jason Kander, a Missouri Democrat then running for the U.S. Senate, assembled an AR-15 while blindfolded and challenged Republican incumbent Roy Blunt to do the same. And in 2018, Democrat Jared Golden hit the bull’s-eye in a campaign ad for his successful race for a flip-district congressional district in Maine.

But none of them threatened to shoot a real person with their gun in the ads.

Harris’s remark — a seemingly casual moment from a candidate who spoke just this week about choosing her words carefully — came as she works hard to portray herself as tough in a campaign against a male opponent who cares deeply about his own image of strength. Her campaign ads and speeches have harkened back to her years as a prosecutor who locked up murderers and transnational gangs, and they promise new security measures at the border.

Her identity as a local district attorney, which led progressives to dismiss her during her 2019 presidential campaign with the words “Kamala is a police officer,” has become a central part of her presidential argument.

Her gun has quickly become part of that picture, even though she has said relatively little about it. She told reporters in 2019 that she kept it for her own protection; a campaign aide said it was now in a secure location at her California home. It’s not clear exactly when she bought it, or whether a specific episode or threat prompted the purchase.

Clearly, Harris’ gun is symbolic of a candidate trying to shake up preconceptions about who a president should be and what Democrats stand for.

The female politicians who have most associated themselves with guns in recent years have tended to be Republicans, such as Sarah Palin or Kari Lake, the Arizona Senate candidate who has posted photos of herself with a gun on social media and urged her supporters to arm themselves before the election.

The other three candidates on the presidential ticket, all men, have also expressed an interest in guns. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s penchant for hunting was practically the first thing the Harris campaign told the nation about him. When accepting his vice presidential nomination, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio talked about finding his grandmother’s 19 loaded handguns, and last year, when the country was obsessed with Chinese spy balloons, he posted a photo of himself staring at the sky with a rifle in his hand.

And Trump visited a gun store last year and said he wanted to buy a firearm — even though his criminal charges raised legal questions about such a sale. He has a concealed-carry permit in New York that the NYPD sought to revoke after he was convicted of 34 felony charges.

Harris has tried to make the idea of ​​a female president seem like it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Her talk about her gun may be a way to portray herself as not so different from the men she runs with, against, and follows in the presidential race.

The post Kamala Harris Tells Oprah They’ll ‘Get Shot’ If Someone Breaks Into Her Home first appeared on New York Times.