One of the more heated moments (in a night full of them) during the debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris came during a hot button issue: the second amendment and firearms.
Harris took umbrage with a common republican talking point parroted by Trump: that Democrats are going to take people’s guns away. Harris shot back with the fact that she and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are both gun owners themselves. Walz followed up on that after the debate with his own statement on the matter.
During the debate, Trump claimed that Harris had a plan to “confiscate everybody’s gun.” For the record, he also claimed that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats, which moderator David Muir called not credible. Trump also claimed that babies were being executed after they were born. Moderator Linsey Davis simply said, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill the baby after it’s born.” Harris hit back at Trump with a similar frankness.
“This business about taking everyone’s guns away,” Harris said. “… We’re not taking anybody’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”
In a tweet that has just shy of 3 million views as of this writing, Walz doubled down on this. “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.”
This was a sobering and measured response to that oft-repeated Republican refrain about gun ownership and how it’s being threatened at all times. The school shooting issue, while it never really goes away, was brought to the forefront once again recently when a 14-year-old student brought an AR-15 to Apalachee High School in Georgia and opened fire during the school day, killing four and injuring nine.
Kamala, a former prosecutor, had not brought up the issue of gun ownership during the campaign until that moment, and it looks like she and Walz are going to make the issue one of the campaign’s main thrusts, along with abortion. However, when Harris ran for president five years ago, she told reporters in Iowa that one of the reasons she became a gun owner was for personal safety when she was a prosecutor. Despite that fact, she said she supports stricter gun laws.
In 2023 when Biden established the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, he put Harris in charge of it. She also supported Biden’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law in 2022.