US Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris steps off Air Force Two at La Guardia International Airport in New York on October 7, 2024. Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris revealed in an interview broadcast Monday that she owns a Glock semi-automatic pistol — and said that “of course” she’d fired it on a shooting range.
Speculation has swirled about the US vice president’s weapon of choice ever since she told television star Oprah Winfrey recently that she was a gun owner and that she would shoot anyone who broke into her house.
“I have a Glock, and I’ve had it for quite some time,” Harris said in an interview on the primetime CBS show 60 Minutes when asked what kind of firearm she packed.
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“My background is in law enforcement. And — so there you go,” added the former prosecutor and California attorney general.
Interviewer Bill Whitaker then asked if Harris had ever fired the Glock. Harris replied with a laugh: “Of course I have. At a shooting range. Yes, of course I have.”
Austrian manufacturer Glock makes one of America’s best-selling handguns. Widely used by police, Glocks have also attained cult status from their appearance in films and hip-hop culture.
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Until recently Harris had rarely mentioned her status as a firearms owner, in line with her party’s emphasis on curtailing access to guns in a country regularly rocked by armed crime and mass shootings.
But in a tight election with Republican Donald Trump, the 59-year-old Democrat has begun to play up her gun-owning credentials.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that Harris wants to confiscate Americans’ guns in violation of the US constitution’s Second Amendment — including in their only televised debate last month.
Harris fiercely rejected that charge, noting that she and her running mate, Tim Walz, are both gun owners.
“I’m a gun owner,” she then told Winfrey in September. “If someone breaks in my house, they’re getting shot,” she added with a chuckle.
Her Glock revelation in was the most eye-catching in an interview that saw Harris carefully navigate tough questioning on hot-button topics like immigration and the economy.
Trump backed out of a 60 Minutes encounter last week, bucking what the program said was a half-century tradition of both US presidential candidates sitting down with the show before an election.