Vice President Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will join her on the 2024 Democratic ticket for the White House, despite the pair previously having wildly differing views on the Second Amendment and gun control.
“I am proud to announce that I’ve asked @Tim_Walz to be my running mate. As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his. It’s great to have him on the team. Now let’s get to work,” Harris posted to X on Tuesday morning.
Walz is in the midst of his second term as Minnesota governor, and previously served as a U.S. congressman in the state from 2007-2019, where he represented a largely rural population. Back when he served as a congressman in a district that typically voted red, Walz was seen as a champion of gun rights and hunting.
The National Rifle Association awarded Walz an A rating for his commitment to protecting gun ownership and rejecting gun control laws pushed by left-wing members of the Democratic Party.
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Gov. Tim Walz speaks at an event in Northfield, Minnesota, on Nov. 1, 2023. (Christopher Mark Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Tim Walz is a gun owner. He grew up hunting and spent 24 years in the Army National Guard. Now in Congress, Tim stood up time and time again for the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun owners and sportsmen. It’s why the NRA gave Tim an ‘A’ rating,” a 2010 political ad declared.
Walz’s celebration of the Second Amendment included earning him a spot on Guns & Ammo magazine’s 2016 list of 20 top politicians for gun owners.
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“A Democrat, Rep. Walz proves that gun rights are not always partisan issues. Walz Co-sponsored ATF reform legislation back in 2008 and was a lead sponsor in the SHARE Act,” Walz’s feature on the list reads. “While most congressional Democrats have jumped on the gun control train with both feet, Tim Walz and a few others have stuck to their guns.”
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to the media after touring a Planned Parenthood facility in St. Paul, Minnesota, with Gov. Tim Walz and Planned Parenthood North Central States chief medical officer Sarah Traxler, March 14, 2024. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via Getty Images)
Walz has since changed his tune to champion gun control measures, and lost his high marks among the Second Amendment community. The NRA slammed Walz as a “political chameleon” in a statement provided to Fox News Digital on Tuesday after Harris officially announced him as her running mate.
“Tim Walz is a political chameleon – changing his positions to further his own personal agenda. In Congress, Walz purported to be a friend of gun owners to receive their support in his rural Minnesota district. Once he had his eyes set on other offices, he sold out law-abiding Minnesotans and promoted a radical gun control agenda that emboldened criminals and left everyday citizens defenseless. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz cannot be trusted to defend freedom and our Constitutional rights,” Randy Kozuch, chairman of the NRA Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF), said in a statement.
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Walz’s previous gun stances stand in stark contrast to Harris’ celebration in recent years that the Biden administration would take on the NRA and win, citing Biden’s work as a senator when he voted to ban semi-automatic firearms in 1994 as part of a major crime bill.
“@JoeBiden has taken on the @NRA and won. He can do it again,” Harris tweeted last year, accompanied by a campaign ad celebrating Biden’s determination to “ban assault weapons.”
Biden, while serving as a Delaware senator, voted to ban semi-automatic firearms in 1994 as part of a major crime bill, while the Democrat-majority House at the time passed the ban as a standalone bill. The bill ultimately was incorporated into the sweeping anti-crime package and required exceptions in order to pass, including a sunset provision.
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Sen. Kamala Harris speaks at an event in Las Vegas on April 27, 2019. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
The bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in September of that year. It enacted a 10-year ban on the manufacture, transfer or possession of “semiautomatic assault weapons” and “large capacity ammunition feeding devices.”
The law expired in 2004, when George W. Bush was president and Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress.
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Fast-forward to 2009, when Barack Obama was president, Walz was one of 65 Democrats in the House who signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder opposing any bans similar to the one from 1994, the Star Tribune previously reported. Holder notably was chosen by Harris this year to head up the vetting process of the pool of potential veeps before Walz was ultimately chosen.
Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a press conference regarding gun legislation at City Hall on Aug. 1, 2024 in Bloomington, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
In 2017 and 2018, the then-congressman wildly changed his tune on gun control, joining fellow Democrats in their calls to tighten laws on gun ownership. Walz announced in 2017, following the tragic Las Vegas shooting, that he was donating the roughly $18,000 he received from the NRA to charity.
Days after the tragic school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, Walz joined fellow Democrats in calling for gun control measures. Last year, the governor also signed into law universal background checks and a red flag order, which was slammed by Second Amendment groups.
Walz wrote in an op-ed in 2018 that his views on guns are “evolving in some ways,” but that he’s “always been a reformer.”
“To finally come together to end gun violence, we’ll need a new approach. We’ll need to build a coalition we haven’t seen before: rural, urban, suburban and exurban folks; gun owners and gun-violence survivors; hunters and advocates and police officers and the young people who are stepping up right now. We’ll need a coalition of folks of good faith who haven’t seen eye to eye but respect the different ways of life in every corner of our state,” he wrote in an op-ed published by the Star Tribune in 2018.
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“That’s how we get things done in Minnesota: We come together. As a hunter, sportsman and veteran with a lifelong respect for guns, as a resident of greater Minnesota, a teacher, and a dad who just wants his kids to come home safe, I can and will bring together that coalition to end gun violence, preserve our ways of life and ensure that everyone gets home to their families safe.”
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