Kamala Harris knows how to talk about guns — she should do it more often

Here’s one I didn’t have on my bingo card for 2024: Vice President Kamala Harris teaching liberals how to talk about guns. For a politician with a reputation for word salads and evasions, her recent comments on the Second Amendment have been refreshingly clear and straightforward, even if they were also relatively brief.

The first of those came during the debate with former President Donald Trump earlier this month, following his charges that she “wants to confiscate your guns.” A few minutes later, she answered the hyperbolic accusation, though it was easy to miss in the midst of a chaotic exchange. “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” Harris said. “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”

Nobody could be surprised that Walz, a quintessential Minnesota Guy, owns guns. Harris, though, is supposed to be a California communist — at least in the minds of a lot of her MAGA haters. In fact, Harris has spoken about gun ownership before. She just wasn’t the Democratic presidential nominee at the time.

A few days after the debate with Trump, Harris appeared at an event with Oprah Winfrey, where she went into a little more detail about what her gun was for.

“I’m a gun owner, too. If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot,” she said. Laughing along with Winfrey, Harris seemed to recognize how her comment could be construed. “I probably should not have said that. My staff will deal with that later,” she went on to say dismissively, convulsing with genuine, unrehearsed laughter.

Actually, Madame Vice President, and with all due respect, you should have said that much earlier. And you should say it again.

Democrats have struggled to talk about the Second Amendment for ages. In one highly controversial moment during the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama mused that people in the Midwest “cling to guns or religion” as a salve for the ruined economy of their region. It was an arrogant, dismissive remark that suggested a lack of intellectual curiosity. 

I’m not a gun owner, but I’ve shot for sport in eastern Montana, western Virginia and elsewhere. I’ve spent enough time in the Mountain West to know that guns are as commonplace there as Ford F-150s. Friends and family in the New York area own guns, too. None of them are simplistic rubes of the kind Obama seemed to imagine. Neither is Harris, for that matter.

It’s worth noting that even as she has touted her own gun ownership, Harris has made clear that she supports a ban on assault weapons, a Clinton-era policy that massively reduced mass shootings. Reinstating a ban would do nothing about the thousands of handgun deaths, including suicides, but it would still help. So would background checks, which Harris also supports.

The American people support these measures, too. In fact, we are much closer to a consensus on guns than partisans on either side would have you believe. And that consensus resides where Harris appears to already be: Let’s keep guns legal, but let’s also do what we can to keep guns out of the hands of people who are demonstrably dangerous, abusive or mentally ill.

After every mass shooting, conservatives say that the last of these is the root cause. It’s better than “thoughts and prayers” but still insufficient. After all, our incidence of gun deaths are so much higher than that of other developed nations that no disparity in psychiatric diagnoses could account for them. And many experts say that access to guns, not mental health, is the key determinant in gun violence rates. 

Yet if conservatives are committed to this approach, Harris should acknowledge as much, making more thorough psychiatric treatment—and record-keeping—part of her gun control policy package. That package will go nowhere without Republicans, many of whom know perfectly well that we need stricter gun laws but are afraid to say so because they fear that the National Rifle Association will run a primary challenger against them. The more she can do to soften these reasonable conservatives’ fears, the further she will get.

Gun control is one of many issues —abortion, taxation, etc.— where Americans are far less divided than you might believe if you spent an evening imbibing politics-related social media, rife with furious takes and outrageous clips, everyone dunking on everyone else with the latest memes. That isn’t real life, though. In many ways, we remain a centrist nation, moving cautiously to the left on social and economic issues while retaining a fundamentally conservative temperament that makes us allergic to rapid change.

The carefree way Harris discussed her own relationship to the Second Amendment made clear that she grasps this essential quality of the American mainstream—certainly more than Trump does. MAGA understudies like Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are especially out of the norm, representing a creepy authoritarian nationalism that plays a lot better on 4chan than it does in Peoria. 

Harris, on the other hand, is the suburban normie, the soccer mom in Philadelphia or Milwaukee — in other words, an ordinary American.