Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has been hard at work embracing and promoting the far-left gun control policies of Kamala Harris, his partner on the Democrat ticket for president. Among his strategies is underscoring his experience in the National Guard to substantiate his “expertise” with firearms. Yet even CNN, typically a cheerleader for the Democrat party, recently ran a segment acknowledging that Walz has inflated his military credentials in service of his gun control advocacy, with commentator Tom Foreman calling Walz’s insinuation that he was in the line of fire as a soldier “absolutely false.”
A typical logical fallacy often seen in politics is the so-called appeal to authority. This occurs when someone uses a credential in one area to suggest expertise in another, unrelated area. Gun controllers often use this technique when putting their words about “assault weapons” in the mouths of people who own guns or who have been issued one in a law enforcement or military capacity. The message is typically some variant of: “I know what these guns are capable of, therefore you should listen to me when I tell you that ‘ordinary’ people have no business owning them.”
On Aug. 6, for example, the official X (formerly Twitter) account of Kamala HQ posted a video of Walz talking to a crowd about his firearm and gun control credentials. The post summarizes his comments with the remark: “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.” Walz says something similar in the video.
This is an obvious reference to the Harris/Walz ticket’s support for banning AR-15s and other so-called semiautomatic “assault weapons,” which they continually refer to as “weapons of war.” Harris, for her part, has also supported “elimination” and “confiscation” of such guns that owners had legally acquired and never misused. She has more recently backed off this confiscatory rhetoric to appear more “moderate,” though what she actually believes or would do, given the chance, is impossible to know for certain.
There are two main problems, however, with how Walz invokes his military career to make this point.
One, the sort of AR-15s available to the public today are qualitatively different from the version Walz or other soldiers have been issued for military duties. The military versions are legally classified as “machineguns” and are capable of automatic or burst fire. In other words, those guns can fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger. The AR-15s sold at gun shops today are capable only of semi-automatic fire, meaning each round requires a separate pull of the trigger. This is the same for any repeating firearm, including a revolver or a modern auto-loading shotgun. Machine guns like the ones Walz was issued have been banned from civilian acquisition since 1986 and prohibitively restricted since 1934.
The other problem, and where Walz intrudes on especially sensitive ground, is that he never carried any sort of gun “in war.” Records of Walz’s military career show that while he was stationed overseas in Italy for a period of months, he never served in a combat zone and was never exposed to enemy fire. As CNN commentator Tom Foreman explained: “There is no evidence that at any time Gov. Walz was in a position of being shot at, and some of his language could easily be seen to suggest that he was. So that is absolutely false when he said that about, about, uh, gun rights out there.”
In other words, Walz is not some hard-bitten combat soldier who came to his opinion about the merits of banning AR-15s because he saw what the automatic version of that platform could do in the heat of battle.
The evidence instead suggests that he simply adopted the positions on gun control required of any aspirant of his party when making the move from representing a rural district to seeking statewide or national office. The democrat party, its major donors, and Harris herself all support banning America’s most popular rifle, the AR-15 (a more extreme position than has been adopted in Walz’s home state of Minnesota itself). And as a member of that party with statewide and national ambitions, the formerly pro-gun Walz (who as a Congressman in 2008 voted to overturn Washington D.C.’s “assault weapons” ban) does as well. It is almost certainly not his military experience that informs his opinion on this issue, but the preferences of party elites, most of whom have never served in the military in any capacity nor actually fired an AR-15 themselves.
Information about the percentage of veterans who own AR-15 pattern rifles is not easy to find. One source mentions a survey of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, which put the figure at 30%. If this is accurate, it would mean ownership among that population is 600% higher than among the general American public. Another recent survey indicated more than half of U.S. veterans own some kind of firearm. Thus, the available evidence suggests that veterans who have been to war zones in recent decades are, at a minimum, not especially adverse to owning AR-15s and may actually own them at significantly higher percentages than the general population.
There is obviously nothing suspect about an individual’s personal experiences informing his or her opinions on gun control. This includes military experience of all sorts. There is also nothing inherently dishonorable about serving in the military and having never been exposed to combat or enemy fire.
Nevertheless, someone whose support for banning AR-15s supposedly arises from his having “carried [them] in war” should at least have the military record to back up that position. Tim Walz does not, and his claims to the contrary deserve no respect.
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