Kamala Harris knows how to talk about guns – she should do it more often

Here’s one I didn’t have on my bingo card for 2024: Vice President Kamala Harris teaches liberals how to talk about guns. For a politician with a reputation for word salad and evasion, her recent comments on the Second Amendment were refreshingly clear and direct, even if they were also relatively brief.

The first of these accusations came during the debate with former President Donald Trump earlier this month, after he accused her of wanting to “confiscate your guns.” A few minutes later, she responded to the exaggerated accusation, although it was easy to miss amid the chaotic exchange. “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” Harris said. “We’re not taking anyone’s guns away.”

It should come as no surprise that Walz, a typical Minnesota guy, owns guns. Harris, on the other hand, is considered a Californian communist – at least in the eyes of many of her MAGA haters. In fact, Harris has spoken about gun ownership before. She just wasn’t the Democratic presidential candidate back then.

A few days after the debate with Trump, Harris appeared at an event with Oprah Winfrey, where she spoke in more detail about the purpose of her weapon.

“I also own a gun. If someone breaks into my house, they will be shot,” she said. Harris laughed with Winfrey and seemed to realize how her comment could be interpreted. “I probably shouldn’t have said that. My staff will deal with it later,” she continued dismissively, breaking into genuine, unprepared laughter.

With all due respect, Madam Vice-President, you should have said that much earlier. And you should say it again.

Democrats have struggled to talk about the Second Amendment for ages. In a highly controversial moment during the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama mused that Midwesterners were “clinging to guns or religion” to alleviate their region’s ruined economy. It was an arrogant, dismissive remark that suggested a lack of intellectual curiosity.

I don’t own a gun, but I’ve shot for fun in Eastern Montana, West Virginia, and elsewhere. I’ve spent enough time in the Mountain West to know that guns are as common there as Ford F-150s. Friends and family in the New York area also own guns. None of them are the simpleton rednecks Obama envisioned. Neither is Harris, for that matter.

It’s notable that, despite boasting about owning guns herself, Harris has made it clear that she supports a ban on assault rifles, a Clinton-era policy that massively reduced mass shootings. While reinstating a ban wouldn’t do anything to address the thousands of handgun deaths, including suicides, it would still help. The same goes for background checks, which Harris also supports.

The American people support these measures, too. In fact, we are much closer to a consensus on guns than partisans on both sides would have us believe. And that consensus exists where Harris seems to already be: Let’s keep guns legal, but let’s also do what we can to keep guns out of the hands of people who are proven to be dangerous, violent, or mentally ill.

After every mass murder, conservatives claim the latter is the root cause. While that’s better than “thoughts and prayers,” it’s still insufficient. After all, the number of gun deaths in our country is so much higher than in other developed countries that no differences in psychiatric diagnoses could account for it. And many experts say that access to guns, not mental health, is the determining factor in gun violence rates.

But if conservatives are committed to this approach, Harris should recognize it and make more thorough mental health treatment – and record-keeping – part of her gun control package. That package will get nowhere without Republicans, many of whom know full well that we need stricter gun laws but are afraid to say so for fear of the National Rifle Association running a primary against them. The more she can do to ease the fears of these reasonable conservatives, the further she will get.

Gun control is one of many issues—abortion, taxes, etc.—on which Americans are far less divided than you might think if you spend an evening poring over politics on social media, where angry comments and outrageous clips abound and everyone is throwing the latest memes at everyone else. But that’s not real life. In many ways, we remain a centrist nation, moving cautiously left on social and economic issues while maintaining a fundamentally conservative temperament that makes us allergic to rapid change.

The cavalier way in which Harris spoke about her own relationship with the Second Amendment made it clear that she understands this essential feature of mainstream America—certainly better than Trump does. MAGA candidates like Ohio Senator JD Vance and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are particularly out of the norm, representing a sinister authoritarian nationalism that resonates much better on 4chan than in Peoria.

Harris, on the other hand, is a normal suburban resident, a “soccer mom” from Philadelphia or Milwaukee – in other words, a normal American.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com.