When Kamala Harris said last week during a streaming event with Oprah Winfrey that anyone breaking into her home “would be shot”, she quickly added that she “should not” have made the comment, but quipped that her staff could “deal with that later.” 

Even though it was clear that Harris was joking when she made the comment (which was odd, given that just moments earlier Harris and Winfrey were talking with a student from Apalachee High School and her parents), Harris campaign surrogate Keisha Lance Bottoms still felt the need to state the obvious after the fact, while also parroting the campaign’s claims that Harris is a Second Amendment supporter. 

“It was a joke, and she knew that we would still be talking about it today, but I think it‘s important that people know that the vice president respects the right to bear arms, that she supports the Second Amendment, but she wants responsible gun ownership and she wants our communities to be safe,” Bottoms said.

The former Atlanta mayor claimed Harris’s comment “humanizes” her. 

Maybe I’m just too cynical, but I doubt that Harris’s comment was truly off-the-cuff. Instead, both the comment itself and Bottoms’ unnecessary explanation seem designed to be a distraction from her actual positions and policies about gun ownership and the right to keep and bear arms.

Bottoms was awfully quick to respond to what little controversy erupted over Harris’s claim, but neither Bottoms nor Harris herself have been able to offer any explanation about why Harris supposedly has decided that a mandatory “buyback” of so-called assault weapons is no longer a “good idea”, even though just five years ago she was all in favor of a compensated confiscation scheme. Harris hasn’t bothered to detail what exactly “support for the Second Amendment” means to her; a legitimate question given that in 2008 she co-signed an amicus brief arguing the Second Amendment doesn’t protect an individual right to own or carry a firearm, and just two years ago said the Bruen decision striking down subjective “may issue” carry permitting regimes defied “common sense and the Constitution.” 

The Harris campaign and the candidate herself seem to think American voters are morons. Both she and running mate Tim Walz have started using the phrase “it doesn’t have to be this way” when discussing school shootings and violent crime, but they refuse to explain how, exactly, their vague calls for an “assault weapons” ban, a federal “red flag” law, and “universal” background checks would stop them. Harris’s home state of California has every one of those laws already in place, yet juveniles intent on doing harm are still able to get their hands on a gun and ammunition. 

Instead of actually detailing her anti-2A policies or even explaining what, exactly, Harris believes the Second Amendment protects, her campaign is now trying to manufacture a controversy over Harris’s flippant remark about intruders to her home getting shot. It’s nothing more than a distraction from real issues like the fact that Harris is intent on cracking down on lawful gun owners and our Second Amendment rights in the name of public safety, while also wanting to take school resource officers out of public schools. Harris is completely serious about that, but neither she nor her campaign surrogates are eager to talk about it.