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At a campaign event in Michigan Vice President Kamala Harris told supporters, “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” In the weeks since, she’s talked more about her gun ownership. Her campaign amplified the message, turning a quote about her Glock into a trending sound on TikTok.
The vice president is one of many Americans who own a gun for self-defense. According to Pew, 7 in 10 gun owners in America cite “protection” as the main reason they own a gun. But the idea that guns make us safer is a myth.
Decades of research make it clear that carrying and owning guns increases a person’s risk of death and injury. At the household level, the risk of suicide dramatically increases for both children and adults in gun-owning homes. Having a gun at home also doubles a person’s risk of dying by homicide. Communities with more guns have more gun violence, not less.
For Gen Z, this isn’t a distant threat. It’s something that’s impacted many of our lives deeply. According to a survey conducted by Project Unloaded, about 30% of young people have experienced gun violence firsthand. The crisis is particularly traumatizing for Black and Latino young people. Sixty percent of us have survived gun violence or know someone who has. Worrying about being shot or losing a loved one to gun violence is an everyday experience for many American teens.
I don’t question the vice president’s commitment to addressing this crisis. While the Trump campaign has dismissed school shootings as a “fact of life” and suggested that stronger doors are one of our best bets to stop them, the Harris-Walz campaign is centering gun-violence survivors and advocating for solutions such as funding for community violence intervention work that would undoubtedly make people safer.
But Governor Tim Walz was right when he said in the vice presidential debate, “Sometimes, it’s just the guns.” If we all understand that guns are the problem, then we shouldn’t participate in normalizing gun ownership or gun use, especially when the research is so overwhelming that guns make us less safe.
Guns rarely hold off violent crime. And too often, attempts to respond to a threat with firepower have deadly or life-altering consequences – especially for young people. In 2023, a Missouri teen went to pick up his younger brothers and knocked on the wrong door. The homeowner, a gun owner, shot him in the head, later telling police he felt threatened. (Andrew Lester, the homeowner, is currently awaiting trial on charges of felony assault and criminal action.) A few days later, a similar incident happened in rural New York: A 20-year-old was shot and killed when her boyfriend accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway and the homeowner saw them as a threat.
Thankfully, armed home intrusions are quite rare in America. But shootings inside homes, from suicide, domestic violence, and accidents, are tragically common because of the risks that come with household gun ownership.
I’m only 17 and I’ve feared for my life twice because of guns. I was in elementary school when police chased a man waving a gun past our cafeteria and we all tried to hide as best we could. I was 11 when a normal day at the mall with friends and family was upended by a shooting scare. Luckily, we stayed safe. We didn’t feel safe, though.
Gun violence is the number-one killer of children and teens in America. Those of us committed to stopping gun violence must speak plainly about what the evidence shows: Guns don’t protect us.
