For years, Kamala Harris has barely mentioned the gun she keeps in her home. Since she started campaigning, she has taken every opportunity to talk about it.
• Also read: Harris to give first solo interview since running
“I am a gun owner,” she repeated again last week on the set of American television pope Oprah Winfrey.
Is it a pistol, a revolver? We don’t know. The Democratic candidate for the White House does not specify the type or the manufacturer. We only know that she keeps her weapon in a safe place, at her home in California.
“If anyone breaks into my house, they’ll get shot,” M.me Harris, facing a bewildered Oprah.
In a country regularly traumatized by mass shootings, many Americans were surprised. Isn’t the Democratic Party supposed to embody the fight against individual gun violence?
But, according to three experts interviewed by AFP, the vice-president weighed her words carefully, as part of an electoral strategy.
Fine trigger
“Kamala Harris wants to stop her opponents from portraying her as anti-gun. The easiest way to do that is to announce that she owns a gun,” says Joan Burbick, author of Gun Show Nation.
“It’s very interesting that she ‘joked’ with Oprah that she would shoot a break-in. Democrats are seen as not being tough enough on crime. This runs counter to that line of attack,” said Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at the University of Iowa.
In 2019, Kamala Harris told reporters: “I own a gun probably for the same reasons most people own a gun: for my own personal safety. I’ve been a prosecutor.”
Four years earlier, in an interview with Politico, she had confided that she was “a good shot.”
In a country where criticizing the spread of firearms can cost you an election, the candidate has chosen a running mate with a reassuring profile: Tim Walz, originally from Nebraska, is an avid hunter and former soldier in the National Guard.
About one-third of adults and 40% of American households own at least one firearm.
Donald Trump reportedly owns three handguns. He had a gun license in New York that, according to media reports, had to be revoked after he was indicted and convicted of falsifying accounting records.
The billionaire, the target of two recent assassination attempts, said Wednesday that his life was under direct threat from Iran. “I am surrounded by more men, guns and weapons than I have ever seen before,” he said.
The Republican, officially supported by the leading American gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, accuses his rival of wanting to “seize” the guns of American citizens, in violation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution.
But the candidate categorically denies such an intention. She limits herself to advocating a marginal strengthening of the legislation, in particular the generalization of checks on the judicial and psychiatric backgrounds of gun buyers.
Tightrope walker
Kamala Harris also says she supports a ban on semi-automatic assault rifles, but has stopped short of advocating a mandatory buyback program for these weapons, which are among the most lethal.
The former prosecutor is therefore playing a balancing act on the subject of gun regulation, which comes in seventh place among voters’ concerns for the November presidential election, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.
A gun owner is more than twice as likely to be a Republican as a Democrat, and gun advocates vote overwhelmingly Republican, while advocates for tougher gun laws lean Democratic.
“But these are trends, not absolutes,” said Gregg Carter, a professor emeritus at Bryant University in Rhode Island. “This year’s election is so close that every candidate is trying to pick up a few extra votes whenever they can.”
Ultimately, according to this expert, Kamala Harris “risks little” to her electorate by saying she has a gun at home for self-defense.
