During a contentious fight over guns at Tuesday’s debate with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris brought up a little-discussed fact to defend her position: she is a gun owner.

“This business about taking everyone’s guns away; Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anyone’s guns away,” Harris said in response to Trump on Tuesday. “So, stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”

That’s a new tactic for Harris in her effort to reassure voters she’s more moderate than her record and previous run for president might imply. But will it have much effect?

First off, while this is a new tactic for Harris, it isn’t a new tactic among Democrats. President Joe Biden has often emphasized his gun ownership, and dubious self-defense advice, as a way of softening or justifying his calls for stricter gun laws. In fact, the Harris Campaign has leaned heavily into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s history of hunting with shotguns.

However, it presents a bit of a twist to that formula that she reportedly owns a handgun. And she said she owns it explicitly for self-defense rather than hunting.

“I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do – for personal safety,” she said during an April 2019 event. “I was a career prosecutor.”

But it’s unlikely the high-profile mention that she owns a gun, even a handgun, will shake up how gun voters view the race. But it isn’t necessarily meant to do that. Instead, it’s an effort to reassure gun owners who don’t vote exclusively on gun politics.

Just as with her numerous other flip-flops, pointing to her own gun ownership as a parry for Trump’s assertion she would “confiscate everyone’s gun” is an attempt to redefine herself in the midst of a lightning campaign.

The debate exchange originated from comments Harris made during her unsuccessful 2019 presidential campaign. She was one of several Democratic primary candidates who supported a mandatory buyback of at least some firearms. Her proposal focused on requiring owners to turn in their so-called assault weapons, which are generally defined as semi-automatic firearms capable of accepting detachable magazines and featuring certain banned features–often including popular rifles like the AR-15.

“We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program,” she said at an October 2019 forum.

However, her campaign walked back that support shortly after she took over the top position on the Democratic ticket.

“Correct, the VP will not push for a mandatory buy back as president,” Lauren Hitt, a Harris spokesperson, told The Reload in July. “She has expressed support for red flag laws, universal background checks and an assault weapons ban.”

Her walk back, however effective it might be, doesn’t extend very far. She still supports a ban on the sale of AR-15s and similar firearms. She still wants to extend background checks to non-commercial private gun sales. She still wants some kind of national extreme risk protection order law.

Then there’s her track record.

Despite buying a handgun during her time as a prosecutor, she has either argued for or implemented strict regulations on their ownership. When she was the District Attorney of San Francisco, Harris signed on to a Supreme Court brief arguing Washington, DC’s total ban on civilian handgun ownership didn’t violate the Second Amendment. When she moved up to California Attorney General a few years later, she activated the state’s microstamping requirement for new handguns–which effectively banned the sale of new models until a federal court struck it down about a decade later.

That all likely limits whatever upside there is for her touting her gun ownership.

To see if it has much effect, of course, she’ll have to lean into it. There’s a good reason most people probably didn’t realize or forgot that she was a gun owner. She hasn’t talked about it much at all to this point.

While they’ve made Walz’s gun ownership and hunting a major part of his biography at the DNC, the Harris Campaign didn’t even mention she owns one. After she mentioned it herself at the debate, her campaign didn’t respond to requests for more details on the gun she owns.

Harris has an opportunity to play up her gun ownership a lot more in the coming weeks if she wants to do so. Talking about how she bought a handgun for self-defense is probably going to do more to connect with the average gun owner than talking about Walz’s hunting trips. Far more Americans own handguns than hunting firearms, and far more say they own them for self-defense.

She can also contrast her gun ownership against Trump’s lack thereof. After all, it was a bit surprising to find out early this year that he also personally owns guns. While his sons are avid shooters, there’s little evidence Trump shares that passion. There doesn’t even appear to be a publicly-available picture of Trump shooting a gun himself.

But it came out that he does own at least three guns as part of a CNN story that he’d turned over two to the New York Police Department earlier this year in the wake of his felony convictions. Trump can’t legally possess firearms anymore because of those convictions. It’s not difficult to see how she could play up the difference between the two of them.

It probably wouldn’t take her very far to put a lot of time and energy into this contrast, though. She’s already using more direct attacks on his convictions and other alleged crimes. And there’s probably little room for improvement among the voters who value gun ownership.

While Trump’s appeal among gun voters is partially driven by a certain kind of macho image, it is primarily due to his reputation for defending gun rights. Though there are flaws in his pro-gun record–like the unconstitutional bump stock ban, he has real accomplishments that gun voters care about–like appointing three of the justices in the majority of the Bruen decision. Harris clearly isn’t doing much to try and win away people who are going to vote based on pro-gun policies and is unlikely to make up ground with them by emphasizing her gun ownership.

Still, she could make inroads with gun owners who relate to her desire for self-protection and don’t feel strongly about restrictions they don’t think will impact them. The question of how many voters in that block are still undecided or unenthusiastic about voting for Harris will probably determine how much more she talks about her handgun.