In her softball interview with Oprah Winfrey last week, Kamala Harris — when she wasn’t swatting softballs teed up for her by the onetime queen of daytime TV — bragged, “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re gettin’ shot.” She then cackled, “Probably should not have said that. But my staff will deal with that later.”

Let’s forget for the moment that what she said about an intruder is true, given her Secret Service protection. Harris clearly wanted to expand her debate assertion that she’s a gun owner, which is somewhat believable given her previous positions and need for self-protection. But does that mean she consents to a home search? After all, when she was a lowly district attorney in San Francisco, she said, “We’re going to require responsible behaviors among everybody in the community, and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.”

So, where’s that handgun permit? Or do you have the 12-gauge shotgun your boss prescribes?

At a time when gun ownership is increasing, particularly among black women, it’s obvious the answer was meant to humanize Harris. The staff that “dealt with it later” was her adviser and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who stated, “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.”

If we presume that Harris actually does own a gun and it’s not campaign bluster, is it really responsible gun ownership to announce to the world, “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re gettin’ shot”?

Here in our humble shop, we have a lot of receipts. You may recall, for example, that Joe Biden was going to run for a second term, and he had an anti-gun agenda. It was just a few months ago when he announced, “Number one, we’re going to, in a second term, God willing, we’re going to make sure that we do something about gun violence in this country.”

Our reaction: This was the same old thing. “Biden is desperate to shore up a political base that has become increasingly disenchanted with him,” wrote our Thomas Gallatin back in May. “He also wants to curtail the right of private citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical government and its globalist ambitions.” You may also remember when Biden’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murtha, called guns “a public health crisis” just before Biden’s ill-fated debate with Donald Trump.

Just last Friday, immediately after the Oprah interview, our Douglas Andrews added: “Harris donned her best black accent to make the remark — which was preceded by another enthusiastic admission that she and her running mate, Tim Walz, are both gun owners. These words were scripted, of course, and their purpose was clear: to make her seem more centrist, more sensible, more palatable to independent white folks than the typical Bay-area progressive of Jamaican-Indian descent who grew up in Canada and whose ancestors were slaveowners and whose dad was a Marxist college professor. After all, this is the same Kamala Harris who’s on record as having declared stand-your-ground laws to be racist.”

Finally, as Power Line’s John Hinderaker pointed out: “The incident is trivial, but it is typical of Harris’s campaign. I’m not a scary left-winger, I’m a gun owner like you! And I’m not weak, I’m tough — can’t wait to shoot an intruder! And I love the Second Amendment and don’t want to confiscate your guns! Unless of course you own a semiautomatic rifle. And so on.”

And that’s where the skepticism comes in. We’ve heard these same old bromides about “commonsense gun laws” for years, usually followed by some other Second Amendment infringement scheme from Congress or a state legislature.

Despite having Secret Service protection, Harris and Walz are, ostensibly, part of a giant club: Americans who own firearms. For most, these weapons are fired out on the range or in the woods while trying to bag an eight-point buck. Others just prefer the quiet protection of having a weapon nearby in case the unthinkable happens, such as a break-in or home invasion — likely still a rare occurrence, but we truly don’t know that with the lack of crime reporting recently. Unfortunately, there are a few who don’t know right from wrong and use their weapons to settle disputes or to make a final statement to society, such as the “manifesto” recorded by the twisted Nashville school shooter.

Those bad apples are spoiling it for the rest of us, and taking away the guns of law-abiding citizens doesn’t solve the problem.

Most likely, Kamala’s gun — if she indeed really has one — is put away someplace, as are millions of other guns around the country. Yet they’re still a deterrent in our hands. And when it comes to autocratic power, they’re a deterrent the statists cannot stand.

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