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.
“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.
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.
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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.
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