Can Kamala Harris Glock the Vote?

Photo: CBS, Diario AS, Fox News, The Oprah Winfrey Network

If Hillary Clinton’s attempt to connect with everyday Americans was to say she carried hot sauce in her handbag, Kamala Harris’s might be talking about the Glock she keeps at home. As the race between Harris and Donald Trump has narrowed in recent weeks, the vice-president has increasingly talked up her gun ownership in an attempt to woo moderate voters. She shot down Trump’s claim at the presidential debate that she would confiscate Americans’ firearms by saying she and running-mate Tim Walz both owned one. “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff,” she scolded. Weeks later, she told Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes that she’d owned a Glock for “quite some time” and laughed in disbelief when asked if she’d ever fired it. She told Oprah that if anyone broke into her house, “they’re getting shot.” (“I probably shouldn’t have said that,” she added, laughing again.) Harris loves talking about her gun so much that Saturday Night Live even turned her comments into a cold-open punch line.

Gun owners are a large and rapidly diversifying voting bloc that consistently turns out at a higher rate in national elections than their non-gun-owning peers. Nearly a third of all Americans own firearms, according to Pew Research, and that group includes a growing number of women, people of color, and liberals, driven in part by the destabilizing force of the pandemic and the political tensions of the Trump years. Between 2019 and 2021, according to a Harvard study, almost half of new gun buyers were women.

Lara Smith, a 54-year-old lawyer from Sacramento who describes herself as “to the left” of Harris, embodies this shift. Smith was against private gun ownership until her husband, a former Marine, encouraged her to learn more about how they worked; she now volunteers for the Liberal Gun Club, a group of “left-of-center gun owners” who advocate for Second Amendment rights. Smith is happy to vote for Harris if it means keeping Trump out of office, but she was not impressed with the candidate’s comments. “Of course she owns a Glock,” she says. “They’re like the Honda of handguns.” (Smith favors her Ruger .22 Mark III pistol.)

Harris’s gun ownership hasn’t stopped her from supporting gun control measures like implementing background checks at gun shows, expanding red-flag laws, and banning automatic rifles — all of which makes Smith wary. “If you say, ‘I own a gun but I still wanna ban ARs’, you’re still coming for a subset of guns and you’re still not protecting the Second Amendment,” she says. She wishes the candidate spent less time gabbing about her Glock and more time addressing the policy concerns of her fellow gun owners. Without that, “it comes across as, ‘Oh we’ve figured out that we’re ticking off gun owners, so we’re trying to find a way to fix that, and we’re doing it with statements instead of policy,’” Smith says. “It’s trying to be part of the crowd without understanding their needs.”

Nikkita OCampo, a 28-year-old from Carrollton, Georgia, feels similarly dissatisfied. She bought her first handgun in 2016 after a man she later learned was a registered sex offender camped out outside the Waffle House where she worked and followed her home. Gun ownership is personal to Ocampo, and she wishes Harris had communicated why it’s important to her too. “Her having a handgun — it’s nice for her to say it, but say, ‘Hey, I encourage women to have firearms for self-protection reasons,’” she says, adding, “She’s not an everyday woman who has to walk down the street. She has security.” Ocampo says that while she’s leaning toward Harris, all the Glock talk had little to do with it. “It’s not going to make me lean more positively toward her just for saying that statement,” she says. Instead, Ocampo fears what could happen to her husband, an immigrant from Nicaragua, under a Trump administration.

Black women like OCampo are a rapidly growing subset of gun owners with the National Shooting Sports Foundation reporting an 87 percent increase in gun ownership among Black women in 2021. Those who spoke to the Cut were divided on Harris’s comments. “Me being a Black woman and just identifying with her, it definitely made me feel more positive toward her,” says Drekkia Writes, a poet and self-described energy curator from Arkansas who owns a Ruger American 9-mm. pistol. Writes thought Harris’s comments about shooting an intruder were refreshing, but to Geneva Solomon, a gun-store owner from Southern California, they were “a mockery.” “I haven’t heard her laughing about abortion, I haven’t heard her laughing about immigration,” she says of Harris. “That was a good moment for her to reach moderate voters, but she didn’t. She laughed.”

Brandi Joseph, the owner of Fortune Firearms in Los Angeles, says she sees gun owners like Harris every day. There are few Black-owned gun stores in Southern California, and Joseph opened Fortune as a response to the racism she says she faced when buying her first gun in 2020. “I walked into gun stores that had stickers with Obama with a noose on his neck on the window,” she says. “As a Black woman, I don’t want to do business with those type of people.” Today, the vast majority of her clients at Fortune are women and a surprising number are Democrats. “I think the misconception is always that if somebody has an opinion about a gun law, they want to take all your firearms,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, liberals don’t have guns; they wanna take your guns.’ And yet I have a bunch of them as clients.”

That’s why Joseph — who says she’s “not a fan of either candidate” — wishes Harris started talking about her Glock sooner. “Being a firearm owner is not shameful, so I don’t know why it took this long to get it out there,” she says, adding, “You miss the mark when you don’t let people know that you’re just like them.”

But after hearing from Harris, Abra Belke is hopeful that gun owners’ voices would be heard in her administration. The 42-year-old lawyer and lifelong Republican lobbied for the NRA until she quit in 2013, feeling the group had become too extreme and polarizing. She now serves as an adviser for 97Percent, a group of nonpartisan gun owners who advocate for a middle ground on firearm policy. In her more than 20 years of working with Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Belke says, the hardest part has been talking policy with politicians who don’t own guns and don’t know anything about how they work.

“To have someone who’s got a little bit of technical knowledge, it makes it easier to have these conversations as equals — and that’s meaningful,” Belke says of Harris. That doesn’t mean that they’d automatically agree on policy matters, but at least they’d start on the same page. “Once we’ve agreed that I have a right to own and you have a right to own,” she says, “we’re having a much different conversation.”