Why Kamala’s gun is a powerful weapon She has embraced the American normal

It’s a platitude to say that guns occupy a prominent place in the American psyche. But they are the most explicit dysfunction of American life. As our freedoms expand, so do our fears and insecurities; as freedom gets big in one dimension, people tend to feel small in another. As anyone knows who has sat basking in the sun on an American beach, only to have someone else plant themselves down a few feet away with a large incursive dog and a speaker blaring loud music, one person’s freedom is often another person’s misery. I have a suspicion that as the American sense of entitlement has trampled the sense of American responsibility, and as larger freedoms have resulted in feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy, sedans have been overtaken by SUVs, fast food portions have grown freakishly large, empty displays of personal virtue have grown bigger and bigger — and handguns have come to be seen as hopelessly inferior to semiautomatic rifles.

Harris’s openness about owning a handgun — it’s a Glock, she told 60 Minutes — is probably the most dramatically symbolic step she is taking towards the way people live rather than how they ought to live. If I had my druthers, the next president would pass a national law requiring every gun owner to keep their guns locked up at gun clubs, as they do in Norway, Anders Breivik’s slaughter being a monstrous anomaly in that country. But that is no more likely to happen than Utopia itself. What is within legislative reach is the shaming and ostracising of Republican lawmakers who oppose a ban on killing machines such as semiautomatic rifles. The country needs to return to the days of gun-loving liberal politicians leading the charge against the insanity of private citizens owning weapons of war. To the days when a liberal president could lay claim to common values, thus making it possible for a sense of shared community to push back the boundaries of radical individualism, inch by inch. Walz, a proud gun-owner and hunter, is squarely in this tradition. But he’s not running for president, and his presence on the ticket is too transparently expedient and ornamental for it to represent a positive step forward in this respect. Plus, marksman that he claims to be, he spends much of his time shooting himself in the foot.

It was, most likely, Obama, for all his political shrewdness often too comfortable lolling in rarefied liberal sentiments, who made the Democrats the party of anti-gun fantasy. That created an opportunity for Republicans to turn the Second Amendment into a matter of constitutional Armageddon. Obama’s remark, uttered in 2008, that people in red states “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…” hangs over the Democratic party to this day. Hillary Clinton, his political rival at the time, pounced on that as an instance of unforgivable “elitism”, only to exhibit an identical elitism when she referred to the same segment of Americans as a “basket of deplorables” four years later. By 2016, when Obama blithely declared on CNN that he had never owned a gun, thus strikingly distancing himself from liberal gun-owning presidents who fought for gun control laws, a new generation of young liberal voters had complacently, and childishly, assimilated the idea that gun ownership tout court was a moral anathema.

In this sense, Harris owning up to possessing a gun bodes well for a Democratic party that has become more and more cut off from the way most Americans — decent, commonsensical Americans, not the small contingent of hard-Right fanatics — live their lives. Horrified by police murders of innocent blacks, they want the police to protect them from violence; whether it’s committed by blacks or whites, they don’t care. They are confused by the initiative to introduce young children to the option to radically alter their genders. And even though alarmed by the effects of climate change, they cannot understand why they have been hectored and shamed into buying electric cars they cannot afford.

The acknowledgment, by Harris, that you can own a handgun and, by extension, a hunting rifle, and at the same time want to make semiautomatic rifles illegal, should be about as controversial as someone claiming to be an atheist and suddenly praying to God in a time of trouble. That’s not to say that Harris’s avowal doesn’t also serve several other purposes.

The conventional interpretation of Harris’s “politics of joy” is that she and her handlers mean to contrast that with Trump’s vindictive dark vision of America. But the slogan also tries, on a subtler level, to appeal to people who might be drawn to Trump as the alternative to a repressive liberalism. The woke political revolution of the past eight or so years, now sinking in as an everyday social and cultural style is hardly less dark, in its comparatively understated way, than Trump’s American carnage. In Trump’s vision, ordinary Americans are being chased in the streets by immigrants and criminals. In the woke vision, ordinary Americans are chasing down non-ordinary Americans, group by group. The politics of joy is meant to cry Halt! to both destructive cartoons of American life. (Having invented “woke”, liberals have now made the term embarrassingly unfashionable to use; I demur. You’re stuck with it.)

And what better way to enforce an injunction against the two competing darknesses than the good, old-fashioned American figure of the new sheriff in town, this time sporting, not the six-shooters of Jesse James, but a Glock, the preferred weapon of regular and elite military organisations throughout the world? You’re a criminal or the wrong sort of undocumented immigrant? Hands up. You want to indoctrinate children to feel like racists? Say hello to my little friend. Language in America has become, on the one hand, so extreme, and on the other, thanks to the internet, so much like grunts or graffiti, that words have started to lose their function as vessels of meaning. A gun, on the other hand, has a clear, irreducible meaning.

Finally, and maybe most important of all, the person bearing arms, in this case Kamala Harris, is a short female, part black and part of South Asian descent. In the kingdom of Ends, in the kingdom of God, in the classless society, in the well-ordered society, in Shangri-La, none of that would matter. In America, in 2024, it matters. She also comes across as shallow, thin-skinned, super-entitled, phony and mediocre. That matters. None of this is nice or decent or easy to say. But it is the truth. A torrent of coercive pieties made the impuissant Biden choose Harris as his vice president; Biden’s hubris and lack of character made her their party’s presidential hope. If you had to choose the person least appropriate as Democratic nominee, when the deranged Trump, and the corrupt, craven enablers in his party, simply have to be expunged from the American scene, it would be Kamala Harris.

And so. Here is Harris and her Glock and her embrace of the American normal and the gun as olive branch. It is the gun of the maverick sheriff, of the lone cop inventing their own conformity, of the private eye fighting their way through an existential fog. In American culture, the terrible reality of a gun gets transfigured into the means to a happy ending. As such it might well allow the breathtakingly improbable figure of Kamala Harris to attempt two national salvations: to clean up the insular, self-serving infantilism of woke politics, and to present concrete proof of affinity and respect to alienated people — and who can blame them for their alienation, to a degree? — excited by Trump into a condition tilting on the brink of national suicide.