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| - Harris made those remarks in 2007, when she was district attorney in San Francisco and the city was attempting to curb gun deaths. Legislation requiring gun safes and trigger locks passed months later and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015.
In the weeks ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a video circulating online purported to show the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, saying that gun owners should expect visits from the authorities to ensure that they followed safety rules. For example, a Sept. 20, 2024, Instagram post by conservative pundits Tucker Carlson and Jesse Kelly shared the footage:
The blurry video showed Harris saying, "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 that you're being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs."
The post had gained 443,000 views and 50,000 likes, as of this writing. "I dare them to walk into my home!!" a commenter said.
A longer version of the video also appeared on a pro-gun-rights YouTube channel:
The video and quote come from a 2007 news conference by then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Harris, then the city's district attorney, about new legislation that would seek to enforce safe storage of guns. Harris' full quote (beginning at 32:40) was as follows:
For the most part, we're not creating something new. It's just time. And I think that with the rate of homicides that we've been seeing, and certainly our focus on that and our concern about it — it's just time and it's the right thing to do. And getting back to that earlier question, I mean, I think that the people who are going to oppose mostly what we're doing are the NRA, and they are not African American, and people who live in this community and are traumatized by violence every day. It's people who own guns who are quietly sitting on those guns, and those guns might end up being the weapons of the destruction of a community, because they get in in the hands of some kid who decides that they like what they see on television and they want to act that way. So this is about just basically saying that 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.
In other words, Harris did say the quote. At the beginning of the news conference, Lenore Anderson, then director of the mayor's office, made clear that Harris had been instrumental in writing this legislation. With them stood San Francisco Police Commissioner Joe Marshall, who expressed support for the legislation.
Months later, the legislation became law in San Francisco. The law aimed to make possession and sale of firearms more difficult, to keep better track of firearms dealers' inventories and to force gun owners to secure their weapons either in lock boxes or using trigger locks.
In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed this legislation to stand after the NRA sued the city to stop its enforcement.
Harris, who is a gun owner, said during her 2024 presidential campaign that while she would support stricter gun laws, she would not seek to confiscate people's guns, as her opponent — former President Donald Trump — claimed.
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