No, Kamala Harris didn’t say this about guns

Sen. Kamala Harris has taken a strong stance on gun control, but has she actually threatened to send police to your house to take your guns?

The short answer is no. But that hasn’t stopped social media users from spreading a fabricated quote attributed to her that suggests otherwise.

"If elected & you don’t surrender your guns, I will sign an executive order & the police will show up at your door," reads a post attributed to Harris, the newly selected running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Harris didn’t say this. And there is no evidence Harris plans to force people to surrender their guns. The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

The claim appears to be a mischaracterization of a pledge Harris made during a CNN Presidential Town Hall in April 2019. 

"Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws, and if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action," Harris said during the town hall. 

Harris continued, clarifying what her executive action would encompass. 

"And specifically what I will do is put in place a requirement that for anyone who sells more than five guns a year, they are required to do background checks when they sell those guns," Harris said. "I will require that for any gun dealer that breaks the law, the ATF take their license."

During the town hall, Harris did not discuss confiscating guns using law enforcement officers. What’s more, a commitment to use "executive action" can refer to more than just executive orders, as the Washington Post reported.

At another campaign event in August 2019 in Las Vegas, Harris reiterated her pledge to take action on guns within 100 days of taking office. At that event, she said she would also use executive action to implement "a ban on the importation of assault rifles into our country."

Featured Fact-check

Instagram posts

stated on October 27, 2024 in an Instagram post

Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz “says that if Democrats win they’ll make (U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) speaker of the house.”

In a follow-up question, Harris was asked what enforcement of an assault rifles ban might look like. A reporter is heard off-camera asking, "Does it involve law enforcement essentially going to people’s houses looking for specific banned guns? Does it involve perhaps creating a database of people who are legal gun owners? What kind of process are we talking about here?"

Harris answered by referencing her experience as attorney general in California, when she said law enforcement was permitted to confiscate guns by going to the doors of people who were both "found by a court to be a danger to themselves and others" and were also "on a list where they were precluded and prohibited from owning a gun because of a conviction."  

"I have to stress, lawful gun ownership, that is one thing. We’re talking about something else and we have to stop conflating and blending all these issues," Harris said. 

Harris did not say she planned to send law enforcement officers to the homes of all gun owners, as the post suggests. 

When we first spotted the false quote being shared Aug. 11 on a Facebook page called YET-iheart-NRA, PolitiFact reached out to the page administrator to ask what evidence they had to support the claim. Someone with the Facebook page responded, pointing us to an article from the blog Law Enforcement Today. That article referenced an exchange between Biden and Harris in the September 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, found here. 

In it, debate moderator David Muir of ABC’s World News Tonight pointed out that Harris said she planned to use executive action to ban imports of AR-15 assault weapons if Congress did not act quickly enough. Muir explained that Biden had expressed doubts about the future president’s "constitutional authority" to ban assault weapons via executive order, which Harris had not committed to doing. 

When asked if Biden’s stated concern had a point, Harris jokingly replied, "I mean I would just say, ‘Hey Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say yes we can.’" Here again, there is no evidence she made the statement that is being attributed to her. (The post made by YET-iheart-NRA appears to have been removed since we inquired about it.)

Other fact-checking organizations debunked similar claims that circulated online in 2019, but Harris’ new role as vice presidential candidate caused the claim to reemerge. Fact-checking organizations have continued debunking the claim after it reappeared.

A post claims that vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris said, "If elected & you don’t surrender your guns, I will sign an executive order & the police will show up at your door."

This quote is fabricated. When she was running for president, Harris pledged to take executive action on gun control within the first 100 days of her administration. She did not say she would require people to surrender their guns or say she would order law enforcement to collect guns. 

We rate this claim False.