2 months ago
17
Kamala Harris (Picture credit: Reuters)
WASHINGTON: Taunted by Donald
Trump
for avoiding one-on-one interviews, Kamala Harris is coming out with guns blazing across the media spectrum, including a
CBS 60 Minutes
sit-down broadcast on Sunday where she tried to disarm the gun lobby by revealing she owns a Glock firearm.
Harris has previously disclosed, most notably in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, that she owns a gun ("If someone breaks into my house, they gettin’ shot,” she said, laughing).
But she opened up a little more to 60 minutes, saying she has had a Glock "for quite some time." Asked why, she said, "Look... my background is in law enforcement... so there you go.”
60 Minutes: “Have you-- ever fired it?”
Kamala Harris: “Yes. (laughs). At a shooting range. Yes, of course I have!”
Harris' opening up on gun ownership, along with similar disclosures by her running mate
Tim Walz
, who has revealed he is a small game hunter, is ostensibly aimed at countering the gun lobby in US with the implicit argument that they are not entirely opposed to the
Second Amendment
's Right to Bear Arms, subject to adequate checks and balances.
Not that it has convinced the
National Rifle Association
(NRA), the pro-gun lobbying group which some liberals, including the city council in San Francisco, Harris' home turf, has designated a domestic terrorist organisation. The NRA accused her of using her gun as a "political prop on the campaign trail to try and mask her radical
gun control
agenda."
Protecting the constitutional right to bear arms, despite the epidemic of
gun violence
including school shootings, is an article of faith for the
MAGA
base, to the extent of condoning even the ownership of military grade weapons. They believe any gun control laws proposed by Democrats will the the first step in stripping them of all weapons.
Harris' 60 minutes face-off is among a raft of sit-downs she has lined up over the next week -- including interviews with radio jock Howard Stern, the Late Night Show's Stephen Colbert, and ABC's The View -- after she was pilloried by Trump, who continues to insult her, calling her a "dumb" "low IQ" individual afraid to face media scrutiny.
In fact, CBS said it was Trump who bailed out of the 60 minutes interview, even as his liberal critics say he is fast becoming a laughing stock for his nonsensical speeches replete with racist dog whistles and falsehoods. Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a lengthy story suggesting Trump was in cognitive decline, with a detailed analysis of how his speeches have "grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past."
The Trump campaign though insisted that no interview had been scheduled even though CBS had "begged" for one. Trump notably gives interviews aplenty to MAGA propagandists, mostly on the discredited Fox News, insisting that they are the authentic media and the rest are "fake news," often calling interviewers "stupid" and "rude" when he is subjected to tough questions and fact checking. Although he has lately dropped references to the spurious stories about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats, he picked on a new line of attacks on immigrants in an interview on Monday, saying "we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now," while referring to migrant crimes.
While Harris' CBS 60 minutes interview was typically searching, with questions some of which she dodged (such as Biden virtually bequeathing the Democratic nomination without her being battle-tested within the party), MAGA mouthpieces went into overdrive about her purported inadequacy. Harris also skirted around questions about whether she regretted letting border crossings "quadruple" during her time in office, while maintaining she had tried to control the inflow from day one.
