Vice President Kamala 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.
Harris’s remarks appear to be aimed at swaying undecided right-leaning voters ahead of the presidential election. In doing so, however, she 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.
“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.”
David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, has studied the relationship between gun ownership and injury. He agreed with Semenza, but acknowledged that Harris’s risk of being targeted — particularly as a prosecutor before she had a Secret Service detail — was understandably higher than that of the average gun owner. “For most people, the issue is you’re not gonna be attacked at home by somebody you don’t know,” he said.
Investigating America’s gun violence crisis
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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.
In 2015, Hemenway and Sara Solnick, an economist at the University of Vermont, analyzed national government surveys involving more than 14,000 people and reported that guns are used for self-protection in less than 1 percent of all crimes that take place in the presence of a victim. They also found that people were more likely to be injured after threatening attackers with guns than they were if they had called the police or retreated.
Harris previously appeared 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.
Semenza, the Rutgers professor who is also a director at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, said the risks associated with gun ownership should not dissuade every prospective gun owner from buying a firearm, but that “each person has to take into account their profession, their lifestyle, their storage practices, their past experiences.”
“The point is to take the buying decision seriously,” he said.
Harris embodies a growing segment of the American gun-owning population. While gun ownership has long been most common among white Republican households, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in November 2023 found that 41 percent of Democratic voters say they or someone in their household owns a firearm, up from 33 percent in August 2019. Forty-one percent of Black voters also live in a gun-owning household, an increase of 17 points in just four years.
The most common reason Americans own guns? Seven out of 10 gun owners say — like Harris — it’s for personal protection, according to a Pew Research Center survey from last year.
Before running for U.S. Senate, Harris spent the entirety of her political career in high-profile criminal prosecution, first as San Francisco’s district attorney and later as California’s attorney general. She cited her career path to justify her gun ownership when asked about it on “60 Minutes,” telling CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker that her background is in law enforcement, “so there you go.”
District attorneys appear to be among the most likely people in the legal profession to face threats to their safety, though research into the problem is limited. In 2013, NPR reported on an upswing in threats against judges and prosecutors after a Texas prosecutor and county district attorney were killed by a disgruntled defendant. In surveys of lawyers in 29 states between 2006 and 2019, about 40 percent of respondents said they had faced threats or acts of violence in the course of their work.
In response, some jurisdictions have singled out prosecutors for special gun carrying privileges. In North Carolina, for example, district attorneys are exempt from the state’s ban on carrying concealed guns inside courthouses.
Dru Stevenson, a South Texas College of Law professor, has written about the ethics of attorneys carrying firearms in legal settings. He told The Trace that, while he has reservations about the practice, he is sympathetic to attorneys who have faced threats.
“A lot of people really internalize that,” he said. “They feel safer by arming themselves.”
