ALLENTOWN, Pennsylvania — Republicans are casting Vice President Kamala Harris as a threat to gun rights in Pennsylvania as the culture wars take an outsize role in the presidential race.
Harris has tacked to the right on gun restrictions since taking over the Democratic ticket in August. She still supports a ban on assault-style weapons but no longer says those guns should be turned over in a mandatory buyback program.
Harris’s reversal is part of an attempt to moderate her image after she ran as an unabashed progressive in her 2019 presidential campaign. However, Harris continues to be haunted by the position as Republicans seek to animate their base a week before Election Day.
The Republican Party of Pennsylvania has sent repeated mailers warning that Harris wants to leave voters “disarmed and defenseless.” Meanwhile, surrogates for former President Donald Trump have claimed that Democrats will dismantle the Constitution, the Second Amendment included, if given the chance.
The emphasis is natural for Donald Trump Jr., an avid hunter who barnstormed Pennsylvania on behalf of his father Monday.
He ended the day at a shooting range outside of Allentown, where he told supporters their children risk losing their gun rights if they fail to bring their friends to the polls.
“All of those inalienable rights are on the table as far as the Democrats are concerned, and they’re telling us that each and every day,” Donald Trump Jr. said.
The warning is the latest example of Republicans using the culture wars to stoke Republican enthusiasm in Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Harris on Election Day.
In a far bigger bet on transgender politics, the Trump campaign has spent tens of millions on commercials from Pennsylvania to North Carolina highlighting Harris’s past support for sex reassignment surgeries for prison inmates.
Republicans are not dedicating the same resources to the topic of gun rights, but it’s one tool surrogates have used to drive a cultural wedge between Harris and those Republicans she is seeking to court.
Donald Trump Jr. opened his event at the shooting range mocking Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who seemingly struggled to load a shotgun earlier this month while pheasant hunting in Minnesota.
“Guys, I don’t know. I do a lot of shooting,” Donald Trump Jr. said. “It’s just not that hard.”
“Kamala worked at McDonald’s like Tim Walz knows how to load a shotgun,” he said of Harris’s insistence that she worked at the fast food giant, although the company does not have records from 1983 to back her.
Harris first supported a mandatory buyback program for assault-style weapons in the 2020 Democratic primary for president as she sought to differentiate herself from a crowded field of candidates. Back then, as now, she spoke of a “false choice” between preserving the Second Amendment and enacting gun restrictions.
Her signature campaign promise was to take executive action if Congress did not pass universal background checks. For gun manufacturers, she promised to revoke the licenses of those that broke the law and, in some cases, prosecute them for criminal liability.
Today, Harris sees her previous outspokenness as a liability as she tries to shake the Republican critique that she is out of step with the mainstream of the country.
Harris is freshly highlighting her ownership of a Glock and is relying on Walz’s background as an outdoorsman to soften her image. And while she has not adopted a conservative view on the subject, as she has on immigration, Harris has rhetorically tried to quiet concerns that she would move to confiscate guns as president.
In a Monday podcast appearance, Harris even claimed it’s Trump, not her, who wants to terminate the Second Amendment.
“Look, I’m in favor of the Second Amendment. I don’t believe we should be taking anybody’s guns away,” she said. “He wants to terminate the Constitution of the United States.”
At one point, Trump said the Constitution’s election rules should be terminated as he alleged fraud in 2022.
Republicans are determined to keep litigating Harris’s prior stance on gun rights, with three mailers dedicated to the topic sent to a residence in downtown Philadelphia over the last month.
“Own a gun? Kamala Harris will take them or arrest you,” said one flier reviewed by the Washington Examiner. Another warned that “a vote for Kamala Harris is a vote against yourself.”
The message is unusual for Philadelphia, a blue stronghold that tends to favor gun restrictions. The Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania, which commissioned the mailers, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on how widely the campaign literature is being circulated.
Still, the line of attack resonates in more rural parts of the state where Trump allies, chief among them Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have used the Second Amendment as a way to drive turnout. Statewide, around 4 in 10 adults have guns in their homes as of 2021, among the highest percentages in the country.
Musk has dangled a million-dollar daily giveaway for registered voters who sign his super PAC’s petition on freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. On Saturday, he delivered his eighth check at a town hall in Lancaster despite concerns the lottery could be illegal.
In Allentown, Donald Trump Jr. drew a crowd that cared strongly about the matter. Several of the attendees were patrons of the shooting range. Even more were gun owners.
“It’s really the reason I vote every time,” said Mark Krause, 52. “I vote in every election, primaries, everything, just because I feel it’s that important of an issue.”
“It’s at the top,” said Al Anzivine, the CEO of American Animal Arms, a gun accessory company. “I mean, we have a First Amendment, but it’s only as good as the Second Amendment protecting it.”
Equally common was skepticism that Harris was earnest in her change of position on gun buybacks. On the trail, Harris has emphasized “reasonable” gun restrictions, such as red flag laws and universal background checks.
“We know exactly what they say in the beginning is what they’re gonna do,” said Louise Walker, a massage therapist from North Hampton.
“They lie, they flip flop,” she added. “They do it to get the people who don’t pay attention, don’t know what’s going on.”
Not all attendees were concerned about an infringement of their Second Amendment rights, however.
“It’s going to take a lot for them to get our guns out of this country,” said Craig Schadt, 51, an Army veteran from Germansville.
“I mean, that’s what this country was founded on,” he added. “It’s in our Constitution. It’s in our Bill of Rights. So, I don’t think they can do anything to take our guns.”
For Schadt, gun rights will be subordinated to more immediate concerns, such as the economy. That topic, plus immigration, frequently came up unprompted in interviews with the Washington Examiner.
But the focus reflects how Republicans see the presidential race as more about defining Harris than highlighting an individual concern.
In Pennsylvania, the state party has sent other mailers tying her to “four years of failure” under President Joe Biden or, more commonly, painting her as “dangerously liberal” on everything from crime to the border.
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The Harris campaign declined to respond to a request for comment, but Democrats have chosen to highlight Project 2025, a conservative blueprint Trump has disavowed, and claim that he would strip abortion access in their mailers to Pennsylvania voters.
Trump denies that he would enact federal abortion restrictions.
