While most gun control supporters are at least feigning enthusiasm over Tim Walz's performance during Tuesday night's vice presidential debate (and completely ignoring his bizarre comment about befriending school shooters), there's at least one gun control outfit that's not pleased with what Walz had to say.
Project Unloaded, founded a couple of years ago by longtime anti-gun activist Nina Vinik, bemoaned Tim Walz's assertion that both he and Kamala Harris are gun owners. The anti-gun group is all in favor of Harris and Walz's support for a ban on semi-automatic long guns, "red flag" laws, and expanded background checks, but can't stand Walz and Harris claiming to own firearms themselves.
“The Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance campaigns offer dramatically different visions for gun laws in America, but when it comes to gun ownership, they’re singing the same tune – and that’s a problem,” said Nina Vinik, founder and president of Project Unloaded. “Owning and carrying guns makes people less safe. If the goal is ending gun violence, we must be crystal clear about the problem: It’s the guns. Normalizing gun ownership may be politically expedient, but it comes at a cost that American families have paid time and again. We must take a different approach to finally stop this epidemic.”
“Guns make us less safe,” said Shiven Patel, co-chair of Project Unloaded’s Youth Council. “Older generations are sometimes hesitant to make that clear, but my generation is too fed up to be cagey with the facts. No matter who wins in November, we’ll all be safer when fewer people choose to own and carry guns. That’s key to keeping schools safe, stopping gun suicides and reducing the gun violence that traumatizes communities every day in America. Guns are the problem, and everyone who has a public platform and cares about this issue should do their part to make that clear.”
Walz came close to getting Project Unloaded's support when he said that "sometimes, it's just the guns" that are to blame for violence, but his comments didn't go far enough. Vinik, who used to serve as the Legal Director for Legal Community Against Violence (now Giffords Law Center), worked on gun control for the Joyce Foundation, and was on the board of directors of March for Our Lives, has made it clear that the group doesn't support legal gun ownership of any kind. It doesn't matter if Tim Walz only owns a shotgun for hunting, or Kamala Harris claims to keep her pistol locked away in her Los Angeles home. So long as they're not haranguing gun owners for exercising their Second Amendment rights, the Democratic ticket isn't doing enough as far as she or her organization is concerned.
I have no doubt that if Harris and Walz are elected in November, Project Unloaded would be thrilled with the actions they take to diminish and destroy our Second Amendment rights. But when it comes to reducing gun ownership, Project Unloaded is shooting blanks. Millions of Americans have become gun owners for the first time over the past four years, and according to surveys from the National Shooting Sports Foundation and other groups, the face of gun ownership is becoming more diverse than ever before. As the Wall St. Journal recently reported:
Twenty-nine percent of Democrats or those leaning Democrat said they had a gun at home in 2022, up from a four-decade low of 22% in 2010, according to a long-running survey by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization. In 2022, 55% of Republicans had a gun in their home, up 3 percentage points since 2010, the survey of about 3,500 adults found.
In a nationally representative 2023 survey of about 3,000 people by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, about 11% of respondents had purchased a gun since 2020. Among Democratic gun buyers since 2020, more than half were first-time owners, compared with less than a quarter of Republicans, according to researchers who analyzed the data.
We still have a long way to go before there's parity between gun-owning Republicans and Democrats, but the trends aren't looking good for the gun prohibitionists. And as more Democrats embrace their own right to keep and bear arms, it becomes both more difficult and more dangerous for the left to make gun owners an existential enemy.
I don't think Walz and Harris are trying to normalize gun ownership. They're trying to normalize themselves. Gun ownership is already normal, at least in most parts of the country. As folks like sociologist David Yamane and competitive shooter Chris Cheng have discussed, owning a gun may be considered odd or unusual in academia and Silicon Valley, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.
Harris and Walz are talking up their gun ownership because they believe it helps them with voters, not because they're trying to push others to embrace their own Second Amendment rights. They're still more allies than enemies of Project Unloaded, but their attempt to camouflage their hostility towards the right to keep and bear arms is still proof positive that Project Unloaded is failing in its mission to denormalize the exercise of a fundamental civil right.
