Harris Should Acknowledge Risks of Harm When Guns Kept in Home, Critics Say

Gun-safety experts say that Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have embraced a popular firearm industry assumption unsupported by the vast majority of scientific evidence: that the best way to guarantee your safety is to keep a gun in the home, The Trace reports. Harris has touted her gun ownership in several media appearances over the past month, telling Oprah Winfrey that if someone breaks into Harris’s house, “they’re getting shot.” Most recently, in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on October 7, Harris said she owns a Glock pistol and has practiced with it at a shooting range.

Buying guns for self-defense typically relies on the fear of a hypothetical life-or-death encounter: An armed criminal attacks you or a loved one, and it’s kill or be killed. But research suggests that such encounters are exceedingly rare, and that it is significantly more likely a gun will be used in an act of self-harm or domestic violence. “There is plenty of research going back to the early 90s showing that when you own a gun, it increases your risk dramatically for homicide, suicide, and unintentional injury with a firearm,” said Daniel Semenza, a Rutgers University criminologist who is studying defensive gun use. “I think Harris has really missed an opportunity to signal to voters that she has taken this risk assessment seriously.” Still, others point out that Harris does seem aware of such research. Twice she supported legislation to ban civilians from purchasing the same weapon she owns — once in San Francisco while serving as the city’s district attorney, and once as part of an amicus brief in the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court case. Both measures targeted handguns because of their widespread use in city gun crime, giving little consideration to their utility in self-defense scenarios.