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US Vice-President Kamala Harris has spoken of her willingness to use her gun if an intruder entered her home.<\/p>\n
“If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” she said in a jokey exchange during a livestreamed event in Michigan with host Oprah Winfrey on Thursday. <\/p>\n
After a laugh, the Democratic presidential nominee continued: “I probably shouldn’t have said that, but my staff will deal with that later.”<\/p>\n
Harris, who highlighted during the recent presidential debate that she was a gun-owner, went on to reiterate that she supported a ban on assault weapons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A firearm of that type was “literally designed to be a tool of war”, she told Winfrey. “It has no place on the streets of a civil society.”<\/p>\n
Harris’s opponents have increasingly pointed to Harris’s attitude on guns as being indicative of her shifting policy positions ahead of the November election.<\/p>\n
While she stressed her support for an assault weapons ban on Thursday, last week’s ABC News debate moderator noted that the Democrat no longer supported a “buyback” programme that would force gun owners to hand over their AR-15s and other assault-style weapons to the government.<\/p>\n
Buyback proposals gained steam during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race, with Harris voicing her support at the time. “We have to have a buyback programme, and I support a mandatory gun buyback programme,” she said in October 2019.<\/p>\n
During the presidential debate, Harris did not directly explain why she no longer supported the buyback idea.<\/p>\n
Asked by Winfrey to confirm if she had been a gun owner for “a while” herself, Harris replied that she had. She said she was was a supporter of the US Second Amendment, which protects the right to gun ownership.<\/p>\n
But Harris stressed that she wanted tighter gun laws.<\/p>\n
She went on to set out her case for a ban on assault weapons, citing America’s problem with school shootings. <\/p>\n
It was “bone-chilling” for a child to have to go through a drill for such an incident, Harris said. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she added.<\/p>\n
After one of the most recent US mass shootings, a 14-year-old boy has been charged with murdering four people at a high school in Georgia.<\/p>\n
During Thursday’s event with Winfrey – who also spoke at last month’s Democratic National Convention – Harris was also questioned on topics including immigration and the economy. <\/p>\n
Celebrities including Jennifer Lopez featured in the session, which was watched by about 300,000 people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Harris’s gun ownership has been a matter of public record since 2019, when she said: \u201cI own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do \u2013 for personal safety. I was a career prosecutor.\u201d<\/p>\n
But her ownership came to the attention of many in the US – including Winfrey, by her admission – during last week’s presidential head-to-head with Republican rival Donald Trump. It marked the first time the issue had come up in a 2024 debate.<\/p>\n
Harris denied a Trump claim that she would “confiscate everybody’s gun” if elected to the White House, pointing out that both she and her running-mate Tim Walz, a hunting enthusiast, had firearms of their own.<\/p>\n
Trump, too, has also owned three guns, though he had to surrender two of them and face restrictions on the third after facing criminal charges in New York.<\/p>\n
Harris also outlined her stance at a recent rally in North Carolina, saying: “We who believe in the freedom to live safe from gun violence will finally pass an assault weapons ban, universal background checks and red-flag laws.”<\/p>\n
So-called red-flag laws allow people to apply to a judge to confiscate another person’s gun if they are deemed to be a risk to themselves or others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n