It bothers me that Vice President Kamala Harris told a national audience recently that not only does she own a gun, but that anyone who breaks into her house will get shot. I get it—her appeal has to extend far beyond the blue, lefty bubble that I inhabit in South Minneapolis—but I still find myself disturbed by the confession she made during her interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Data from the Pew Research Center shows that about one-third of adults in the United States own a gun, meaning most people do not. I am not here to pass judgment on anyone, including Harris, who wants or feels they need to possess a firearm, but somehow her comments continue to ring in my ears as insensitive and unnecessary.
Maybe that’s because it’s active shooter drill season again and the topic of people getting shot feels a bit raw.
I was reminded of this the other night while gathering with some neighborhood friends. It was a beautiful evening and we sat together outside to discuss the novel Horse by Geraldine Brooks. If you’ve read it, you’ll know that there is a traumatic incident involving gun violence near the end of the book, when one of the main characters is suddenly killed.
Most of us focused on the racial and cultural dimensions of the scene until a friend sitting across from me suddenly asked if we could please stop talking about guns. She put her hands up by her head and shook them as she spoke in a trembling voice.
I stopped for a moment to try and process what she was saying. Yes, guns can be an emotional topic, but also not an unexpected one. What was she upset about, exactly?
Then she started talking about her work in a local high school, where she teaches writing to small groups of kids. To start the school year off, teachers and staff members in the district, along with students as young as five years old, must sit through realistic active shooter drills.
My friend described having to watch videos of police officers storming through the very school where she works, their boots echoing through familiar hallways in pursuit of an imaginary gunman. Students from her own school are also used in the videos, assumingly with consent, to act out what to do in case a classmate showed up with a weapon.
She mentioned having to pack a first aid kit with a class list inside so teachers would be able to determine who did and didn’t make it out in the event of a shooting. She also described being required to watch the active shooter drill videos more than once, including in the morning before the school day started, supposedly in the interest of being prepared.
The experience had clearly rattled her, to the point where she could not handle a discussion among friends of a fictional event involving gun violence. This is why I can’t shake the feeling that Harris’s comment about shooting someone who breaks into her house was reckless.
We are too casual about guns and their supposed usefulness. I wonder if Harris is familiar with a 2024 report from the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, which notes that many Americans believe that owning a gun helps ensure personal safety.
The report also points out that, statistically speaking, this is false, and attributes this misinformation to lobbying from the gun industry. Somewhere buried in our collective psyche is the myth of the American cowboy, standing alone with a smoking gun in hand as a bad guy lies splayed out before us on the ground, immobilized.
It has been twenty-five years since the mass shooting at Columbine High School brought a new level of terror into our communities. Since then, as the gun news outlet The Trace has noted, guns are more ubiquitous than ever. They haven’t kept us safe; instead they’ve upended many lives and made us terrified.
It seems uniquely American to profit from this terror rather than find a way to end it. The New York Times recently documented the rise of a cottage industry that has paired back-to-school shopping with school-shooting preparedness, through items such as bulletproof backpacks and lunchroom tables that can be flipped up for defense in the event of an attack.
And of course there are the active shooter drills themselves. A 2019 article from The Trace found that the school security industry, including outfits that produce and market active shooter drills, is worth billions of dollars but has done little more than traumatize kids and further cloud the issue of how to actually stop gun violence instead of wallowing in it.
I can’t pin all of this on Harris and her off-the-cuff comment, of course. I know that she is only the second woman to get this close to winning the White House, and she must appear tough and confident to soothe any fears about weakness. And Harris has certainly made it clear that she supports stricter gun control measures, which is far more than most Republicans have done
Still, could we agree to drop the tough guy talk when it comes to gun ownership? It’s a tired old fantasy that has not made us any safer.