Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been under fire since he was named as Vice President Kamala Harris’s VP pick. One of the main reasons was past comments Walz made regarding how people shouldn’t be walking around with the “weapons of war” he carried in war.
A lot of people got a little upset because the closest Walz has gotten to a combat zone was a visit to Minneapolis.
A lot of the criticism against him has been the claims of his military career that were, at best, inaccurate and were most likely outright lies. That includes him having gone to war.
But over at the National Review, writer Robert F. Turner argues that there’s a lot more to criticize in that quote.
Left unaddressed in the controversy over Walz’s military service is the suggestion that American soldiers carry special ‘weapons of war’ that civilians at home can easily purchase.
Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor and Kamala Harris’s choice as her vice-presidential running mate, declared in 2018, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is [sic] the only place where those weapons are at.”
It is now clear that Walz lied when he claimed to have carried any weapon “in war.” The Washington Post “fact-checker” found it to be “false.” Walz never got near a combat zone during his military service. The Harris-Walz campaign finally admitted that the claim was untrue but tried to spin it by saying that Walz “misspoke” — as if the fraud was inadvertent.
But left unaddressed in this controversy is the suggestion that American soldiers carry special “weapons of war” that can easily be purchased by civilians at home. Presumably, Walz was advocating a ban on civilian ownership of AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles, on the rationale that they look like the real M16 “assault rifles” issued to our military when both Walz and I served. (I was issued M16s during both of my Army tours in Vietnam.)
Of course, we’ve addressed that particular issue, but we’re also a site that focuses on guns. We would focus on that.
Yet a lot of people are harping on Walz’s claims of having gone to war, and understandably so, and not pointing out that his claims that we’re able to walk into a store and buy an M16 or M4 without missing a beat are also fabrications.
Walz likes to talk up his hunting background, even saying he could shoot more pheasants than Sen. J.D. Vance. If he’s such an outdoorsman and military veteran, you’d think he’d be familiar with the difference between what civilians can get easily and what the military uses.
Yeah, they look similar, but looks aren’t everything.
Walz simply has to understand the differences, and yet he keeps pushing the narrative that we’re somehow walking around with “weapons of war” while knowing it’s not true. With his background, it’s unfathomable that he doesn’t know the difference.
And yes, that’s not getting talked about enough. Part of that is because most people even in the right-leaning media don’t know guns all that well. Then there’s the fact that it’s hard to explain the differences to the average citizen who only knows that my AR-15 looks an awful lot like an Army Ranger’s M4. They don’t know where to look for the differences, so they don’t figure there are any, and that’s hard to explain to them to the point they really grok it.
So, attention gets focused elsewhere.
The thing is, I don’t know that we should pick one or the other. Both his claims of having gone to war and that this is the kind of weapon carried in war are outright lies. The fact that he squeezed two into a relatively short sentence is kind of impressive. He should get full “credit” for both.
