Glock is under fire right now. 

It’s a little strange that they’re being blasted for one someone else did with their design, though, especially after the vice president and Democratic nominee for president said she owned one. If anything, I’d have imagined people would have given them crap for that.

But they’re not.

Regardless, Kamala Harris said she owned a gun. It was important that she said she owned a gun, and while the campaign is over, there’s a big takeaway from that fact, as Charles C.W. Cooke notes at America’s 1st Freedom.

While Harris had a long track record of supporting gun bans, including in places where she supposedly owned that Glock, things had to be different during the campaign.

Evidently, Americans did not believe this. And why would they? From start to finish, Harris was a cynical, opportunistic, dishonest, vacuous candidate and nowhere—nowhere—was she more duplicitous than on the question of guns.

Harris insisted that “we’re not taking anybody’s guns away” while agitating for a ban on the most commonly owned rifle in America. She portrayed her running mate, Tim Walz, as a hunter, while putting out videos in which Walz was unable to load a shotgun. She promised that she was “in favor of the Second Amendment” after having spent years trying to prevent the Supreme Court from recognizing it.

This was all appalling, of course. But, in a strange way, it was also encouraging. Ideally, one would like to live in a country in which all of the candidates for president earnestly desire to protect our right and keep and bear arms. But, if that is not an option, having the anti-gun candidate feel pressured to pretend otherwise is the next best thing. It was noticeable that, despite its own chronic anti-Second Amendment sentiments, the legacy media gleefully blasted out Harris’ claims about her Glock, and, in some cases, even used them as the basis of the claim that she presented no threat to our Second Amendment-protected rights. Why did they do that? Because, like Harris, the press understood that her anti-gun position was a liability, and so they sought to pretend that it didn’t exist.

Her effort didn’t work, of course, but Cooke is right. The fact that she and Walz had to present themselves as supportive of the Second Amendment and as gun owners means something important.

It means that she understood that people cannot and will not elect a gun-grabber in chief.

While Biden has been terrible on guns and easily the most anti-gun president of my lifetime–one that includes voting in the election that resulted in Bill Clinton in the White House, so that’s saying something–Harris would have been worse. Biden supported assault weapon bans, but Harris supported handgun bans. That’s a bridge too far for most Americans.

And she knew it. She knew and understood that it wasn’t going to fly with anyone outside of the most gun-controlled states in the nation, and they weren’t exactly going to go for Trump.

What happened with her claims of owning a Glock was that we were starting to see anti-gun politicians trying to distance themselves from the anti-gun rhetoric because it was a political liability.

It didn’t help because there was way too much anti-gun baggage already there, and having Walz talk smack about how good of a shot he was while making the loading of a shotgun resemble a lower primate fornicating with an oblong ball used in a particular contact sport didn’t help.

But they had to try, and that’s actually encouraging.