The Presidential Debate Missed A Major Opportunity

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump took the debate stage Tuesday night, Kentucky law enforcement officers swept the woods for a former Army reservist. They suspected Joseph Couch, 32, of opening fire this week on highway traffic with an AR-15 outside the town of London.

The week before, a 14-year-old student opened fire with a similar weapon at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, killing two students and two teachers and injuring nine others. It was the 45th school shooting this year, and the deadliest,.

That position likely reflected liberal politics of the time. A mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, had just thrust guns into the center of the Democratic Party, prompting former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), who was also vying for the 2020 presidential nomination, to say flatly: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47 – we’re not going to allow it to be used against fellow Americans anymore.”

The month after O’Rourke made that comment, Harris followed suit.

“We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program,” Harris said in October 2019. “It’s got to be smart, we got to do it the right way. But there are 5 million [assault weapons] at least, some estimate as many as 10 million, and we’re going to have to have smart public policy that’s about taking those off the streets, but doing it the right way.”

Harris likely underestimated the cost of such a program. There are actually more like 28 million semiautomatics that likely meet the definition of “assault rifles” circulating today in the United States, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry trade group. Paying a roughly fair-market price of $400 per rifle would cost the government more than $11 billion in compensation costs alone.

Taking that position has also opened Harris up to the repeated charge from conservative critics that she wants to take away legally purchased firearms.

Randy Kozuch, the executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, called Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “gun-grabbing radicals who support confiscating firearms from law-abiding hunters and gun owners” last month. Trump echoed that charge twice during Tuesday night’s debate.

Without prompting from the moderators, Harris indicated that she no longer supports buybacks.

“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” Harris said. “We’re not taking anyone’s guns away.”

That casual reference to her handgun ownership for personal protection, which she previously disclosed in her 2019 run, came as a surprise to many viewers and may have shaken the right-wing caricaturization of Harris as a “gun-grabber.”

Prospective voters concerned about gun violence, however, heard nothing about how her administration would tackle the issue.

An assault weapons ban, universal background checks and a red flag law are all standard Democratic positions. None are likely to become law without a major shift in the composition of Congress.

It’s also not clear how much latitude Harris would have to push reforms through the executive branch. President Joe Biden’s attempts to restrict gun violence face an uphill legal battle.

Regulations from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives aimed at imposing background checks at gun shows and restricting access to pistol braces and forced-reset triggers, devices that make guns shoot faster, have all been enjoined by federal judges.

While that litigation continues to play out, the message is clear: The White House will likely struggle to push gun reform on its own.

The Supreme Court’s expansion of Second Amendment rights since the landmark 2022 case New York State Rifle and Pistol Assn. v. Bruen has made it all the more difficult for politicians to push through reforms.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in that case dictated that the federal courts should no longer balance the right to bear arms against the interest in public safety when assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. Instead, according to Thomas, the constitutionality of gun restrictions should only depend on whether a given law fits within a historical tradition dating back to sometime between the signing of the Bill of Rights in 1791 and the end of the Civil War.

Harris can point to obvious accomplishments on gun reform as vice president, including becoming the first-ever head of the White House Office on Gun Violence Prevention and helping craft and pass the only consequential bipartisan congressional legislation on the issue in a generation. But if she has a plan to work around the many obstacles to further reform, voters have yet to hear it.

The debate also marked a missed opportunity to hear more from Trump about gun violence.

Since he first contended for the presidency, Trump has beat the drum of Second Amendment absolutism. (Trump himself can no longer possess firearms or ammunition because he is a felon.) The three conservative justices he nominated to the Supreme Court made the Bruen decision and its sweeping expansion of gun rights possible.

But in July, Trump himself became a victim of a mass shooting carried out with an AR-15. A similar assassination attempt moderated former President Ronald Reagan’s open attitude toward firearms, but voters don’t know whether Trump’s views have changed at all.

And while Trump is best known for subverting gun regulation, his administration pushed through one landmark reform: using an ATF regulation to ban bump stocks.

The Supreme Court overturned that regulation this year, contending that only Congress has the power to reclassify the accessories as machine guns. Does Trump still support such a measure?

Navigating the divisive issue of gun violence only promises to become more difficult. In addition to congressional deadlock and legal constraints, guns are becoming still more pervasive in American life.

The COVID-19 pandemic — with its outdoor renaissance, crime panic and the political upheaval unleashed by a spate of police violence in 2020 — sent gun sales skyrocketing.

Those events also appeared to change the profile of the average gun buyer. First-time gun owners, liberals, women, and people of color all appeared to buy up more guns than they historically have.

If the presidential candidates agree to another debate, that evolving group of people will want to hear more about where the candidates stand on guns — and so will the majority of Americans who choose not to exercise their expanded Second Amendment rights.