With polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris deadlocked just a few weeks before Election Day, both campaigns are doing their best to court the dwindling number of undecided voters. But the Harris/Walz campaign’s outreach to gun owners misfired over the weekend when Tim Walz took to the fields for the opening day of Minnesota’s pheasant hunting season.
Walz has touted his shooting prowess and love of hunting on the campaign trail, but the Minnesota governor failed to bag a single bird over the course of several hours. Even worse, Walz fumbled about while trying to load his shotgun before setting off on his long walk.
I won’t ding Walz too much for not getting any birds on Opening Day. Sometimes it’s the luck of the draw and you just come up empty. At least he didn’t pull a Kerry and claim to have bagged a bird while letting a buddy carry the carcass, so Walz has that going for him.
But while Walz has participated in Opening Day on multiple occasions, he was incredibly awkward on Saturday. He looked like he was completely unfamiliar with his Beretta shotgun, even though he indicated to reporters that the gun wasn’t a new purchase. And though Walz received plenty of mockery on social media for his difficulty loading shells into his Beretta, most of the media on hand to document his hunt ignored his awkwardness in favor of playing up the campaign’s pitch to gun owners.
The governor wore Carhartt hunting chaps and an orange vest that commemorated the annual season opener, participating in the hunt in his official capacity as governor. Still, it was followed up with a campaign engagement and came on the heels of a recent campaign announcement revealing a new voting coalition of hunters, anglers, and gun owners.
The new coalition will seek to underscore Harris’ support for “traditional activities.”
Both Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz have leaned into the fact that they are gun owners recently — all the while continuing to advocate for legislation like universal background checks. In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Harris revealed she owns a Glock, and during an event with Oprah Winfrey, the former prosecutor declared, “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”
Every time a major media outlet shares Harris’s comments about owning a Glock and intruders getting shot without mentioning her support for handgun bans in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., Edward R. Murrow rolls over in his grave. CBS News also failed to acknowledge that Harris has previously advocated for a collective rights view of the Second Amendment or the fact that her campaign has refused to say if or when she’s changed her mind, which is yet another bit of professional malpractice for the reporters covering the candidate.
Then again, CBS News couldn’t even bring itself to mention Harris and Walz’s call for a ban on so-called assault weapons, choosing instead to only highlight Harris’s demand for universal background checks.
As the race tightens up, Harris’s supporters in the media are going to be even more reluctant to highlight the outright hostility towards the right to keep and bear arms and lawful gun owners that she’s displayed throughout her political career. If they were to talk about Harris’s past support for a gun ban as much as they did her alleged current ownership of a Glock, voters might correctly get the impression that Harris is trying to gaslight them when it comes to the Second Amendment. The media couldn’t help Tim Walz shoot a pheasant on Saturday, but they’re still doing everything possible to help Harris bag the White House come November.
