In a tight primary for governor in 2018, Tim Walz, then a congressman from a conservative pro-gun district in Minnesota, was rebuked for his A ratings from the National Rifle Association. After a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., he went on the offensive.
Mr. Walz wrote an opinion piece asserting that he had “repeatedly voted in favor” of tougher background checks, federal gun violence research and firearm bans for people on no-fly lists. He had “voted for universal background checks more than anybody in this race,” he told an interviewer. And he posted a video in which he said he had voted “dozens of times” in Congress for stronger gun laws.
Gun advocates, however, had never questioned his loyalty as a legislator. The N.R.A. kept giving him high marks until he ran for governor, and Guns & Ammo magazine in 2016 named him one of its top 20 lawmakers.
“While most congressional Democrats have jumped on the gun control train with both feet,” the magazine said, “Tim Walz and a few others have stuck to their guns.”
Which version of Mr. Walz, now running for vice president, was right?
The answer lies in his bumpy transition from an unabashed small-town gun guy to a statewide candidate facing an electorate with starkly different views. It was a change propelled in part by high-profile mass shootings that also became a campaign issue.
There is no doubt that after he won the governorship, Mr. Walz, a hunter and a veteran, enacted stronger state gun laws, including expanding background checks to include private sales of firearms and allowing the police to temporarily take guns from people deemed dangerous. Today, he is viewed as a model for Democratic politicians seeking to balance Second Amendment rights and public safety. And his N.R.A. report card now contains straight F’s.
But how he got there was messy. He was dogged throughout the 2018 race by attacks on his pro-gun record in Congress, and then by accusations that he had flip-flopped to win the left-leaning Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s nomination.
At times, Mr. Walz appeared to acknowledge that campaign realities, and the larger office he was seeking, had at least something to do with his transformation.
In announcing his support for an assault weapon ban after the Parkland shootings, he told The Star Tribune: “I’m not just asking to be the congressman from the First Congressional District. I’m looking at a broader state with broader issues, broader population densities, and I think as a legislator I’ve been proud to say if the facts dispute our ideology, change the ideology.”
As Mr. Walz sought to rebut charges that he had only recently altered his views out of political expediency, he pointed to procedural votes he had taken in Congress in 2015 and 2016. They were less significant than he implied. Virtually all of them were party-line roll calls to allow debate on gun controls, not votes on the underlying bills. These parliamentary maneuvers had no chance of succeeding in the Republican-controlled House, but they would allow Democrats to accuse the G.O.P. of blocking politically popular proposals.
That is why advocates on both sides of the gun issue gave them no credence at the time. Bryan Strawser, chairman of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, said procedural votes that went nowhere did not matter.
“I would see these votes and his mention of them when he ran for governor as an attempt to rewrite the script and position himself in the best possible light for his new political ambitions,” Mr. Strawser said, adding that Mr. Walz had “always voted to support gun rights” until it no longer suited him.
Rachael Joseph, a gun control activist who founded a group called Survivors Lead, said she was glad Mr. Walz shifted his stance when he did. But gun violence had been an obvious problem long before he ran for governor, she said, and “he just wasn’t there.”
“Maybe it wasn’t as easy for him to speak out at that time,” Ms. Joseph said. “I don’t know whether he’s truly seen the light on this issue or not, and I guess I don’t necessarily care.”
The Harris-Walz campaign declined to comment.
Mr. Walz’s long history of familiarity and ease with firearms is among his selling points as he campaigns for vice president and seeks to reassure rural, conservative voters wary of the Democratic Party. He invokes his respect for guns, along with the need to impose reasonable limits on them, in the same breath.
But for a long time, his emphasis was on the pro-gun side of the equation. Second Amendment rights played well in his district, a rural area that went big for President Donald J. Trump in 2016 and rarely sent Democrats to Congress.
For years after he first won the seat in 2006, his campaign materials and social media posts highlighted his love of hunting. He co-chaired the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus and won awards at shooting competitions.
While in the House, he was one of a handful of Democrats to regularly get campaign donations and top ratings from the N.R.A. He joined other pro-gun lawmakers in 2009 to oppose an assault weapons ban, and in 2011 he cosponsored a bill that would have allowed permit holders to carry concealed firearms outside their home state.
But he appeared to soften his stance after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut in 2012, when a 20-year-old man armed with an AR-15-style rifle and high-capacity magazines killed 26 children and adults.
Mr. Walz said at the time that he was open to considering bans on certain weapons and magazines and strengthening background checks. “If we as a society, because of the nature of where we’re at, we have to take a look at that, I certainly want that to be at the table,” he said.
But there is little evidence that he took meaningful steps to change his position. When a House bill to ban assault weapons was introduced a month after Sandy Hook, he did not join more than 80 Democrats as a cosponsor. Nor did he join them on proposals to expand background checks. He never had a chance to vote on the bills because they died in committee.
And Mr. Walz continued to receive the N.R.A.’s endorsement. In 2014, he supported an amendment aimed at hindering the District of Columbia’s ability to enforce stringent local gun laws. He cosponsored N.R.A.-backed legislation in 2015 expanding access for hunters and sports shooters on federal land. Later, he voted for a bill allowing veterans deemed mentally incompetent to purchase firearms unless a judge ruled that they posed a danger.
It was during this time that he joined most House Democrats, who were in the minority, in voting to force debate on various things by attaching them to unrelated bills. They had no hope of passing, but Democrats would use them to accuse Republicans of refusing to take up issues like denying firearms to people on no-fly lists. The votes later proved useful for Mr. Walz as well.
When he first began campaigning for governor, gun control was not the front-and-center issue that it would become. A news story about his intention to run in March 2017 said “he expects to talk on the campaign trail about the importance of funding public schools and investing in critical transportation infrastructure.”
That changed in October, when a man using a bump stock to simulate automatic fire killed 60 people at a Las Vegas music festival. Mr. Walz’s opponents pounced. After another candidate for governor, State Representative Erin Murphy, challenged Mr. Walz to give back the $18,000 he had gotten from the N.R.A., he said he would donate it to a veterans charity. He also cosponsored legislation to ban bump stocks, called for a select committee on gun violence prevention and urged other reforms.
“Now it’s time to move on and actually make some progress on this issue,” he wrote on Facebook. “Let me be clear: I’ve got the credibility to bring gun owners to the table in St. Paul to get this done.”
As the campaign entered 2018, he continued facing criticism. Rebecca Otto, the state auditor, running against him, said at the time that “he had many opportunities to change” after Sandy Hook, “and the only thing that’s changed is that he’s running for governor.”
After the Parkland school shooting left 17 dead, Mr. Walz joined other Democrats in cosponsoring a bill to ban assault weapons. In explaining his decision, he said he was influenced in part by his daughter, Hope, who implored him to make a difference.
“Like America, I’ve seen enough of this,” he said in a video. “I’ve seen enough of this carnage.”
Mr. Walz prevailed in the primary, defeating four other candidates with 41 percent of the vote, and won the general election in November. As governor, he followed through with many of the gun proposals he had talked about during his campaign.
In addition to the expanded background checks and the red-flag law allowing the police to disarm potentially dangerous people, he approved legislation increasing penalties when an ineligible person uses someone else to purchase a gun on his or her behalf, and banning a trigger device that increases the firing capacity of semiautomatic weapons. Gun safety groups tend to consider Minnesota’s firearms laws good but not exceptional. It does not have bans on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines, although Mr. Walz has said he would consider them if they were brought up in the Legislature.
Mr. Walz’s current positions put him largely in line with Vice President Kamala Harris, who has frequently called for stronger nationwide restrictions on firearms. And his record during six years as governor has left some former adversaries convinced of his change of heart.
“He evolved, and that’s what we like to see in our elected officials,” Ms. Otto said last week. “Only he knows why, but I do think it was for the right reasons.”
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