Minnesota governor and failed vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is fed up with Republican lawmakers’ opposition to all the gun control schemes he wants to see passed in the North Star State.
In fact, he’s so fed up that he’s now threatening to unilaterally make his own laws through executive action, despite the fact that such shenanigans would almost certainly run counter to the law.
At a press conference last week, Walz said he is preparing to take “incredibly aggressive executive action” on gun control proposals because of what he called “stonewalling” by Republicans in the legislature, according to a report at Fox9.com. Of course, what he calls “stonewalling” is simply lawmakers representing their constituents, many of whom don’t believe more gun laws are the answer to any of the state’s problems.
“I’ll be rolling out a series of incredibly aggressive executive actions because of the stonewalling, and the ability to deal with this,” Walz told reporters in his usual impossible-to-understand speech pattern. “78% of people in the suburbs support an assault weapons ban and a ban on high-capacity magazines. 60% of the people strongly support it across the state, 18% do not. Those 18 are apparently Republican legislators and leaders who are here at the Capitol. Minnesotans are dying, literally, for us to do more around gun violence prevention.”
His B.S. statistics aside, Walz’s boast about executive action comes after anti-gun lawmakers were unable to garner enough support to get a special gun-control session of the legislature to first base. Finally, he decided the idea of a special session was just “a waste of time”—one of the few sensible things he has said since he came into the limelight during the 2024 presidential election.
“I need to get an agreement on this,” Walz said in mid-October. “If we’re going to hold a special session on the safety of our children, the safety of our streets, and gun violence, we need to talk about guns. And if the folks who hold veto power over this—which they do because of the makeup of the Legislature—if they say that’s not going to happen, calling a special session is going to be a waste of money and a waste of time.”
Of course, the holy grail for Walz and other Democrat gun-ban advocates would be a ban on so-called “assault weapons”—actually extremely common semi-auto rifles that fire one round with each pull of the trigger, just like other semi-auto rifles and pistols. Banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds is also on their wish list, even though such a law has never succeeded in lowering violent crime levels.
In the end, it’s likely that Walz made the pronouncement of future executive actions to draw attention away from the latest Minnesota scandal, in which he looked the other way as Somalis living in the state allegedly defrauded the state government of millions of dollars. In fact, the U.S. Treasury is looking into whether tax dollars from Minnesota actually made their way into the hands of Al Shabab, a Somali-based al Qaeda affiliate.
Given Waltz’s ineptitude at nearly everything, it’s unlikely he’ll be able to take any executive action concerning firearms. Still, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on any top government official who says he’s going to ban guns with no legislative involvement.
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