Gov. Tim Walz flew under a lot of people's radar for a long time, mostly because he was pro-gun during most of his tenure in Congress, then became anti-gun just before running for governor of an anti-gun state.

Convenient, to say the least.

However, he's been consistently anti-gun since then and he's been vehemently so.

We've talked aplenty about Walz and his wrongheaded ideas, but John Lott decided to do a bit more over at The Federalist. He absolutely dismantles Walz and his claims on guns.

Let's start with his claims regarding the CDC being prohibited from doing research.

“Ispent 25 years in the Army and I hunt,” Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., declared in 2018. “I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks, we can do CDC research, we can make sure that we don’t reciprocal carry among states. And we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are allowed to be carried.” In just a few sentences, Walz made false claims about assault weapons, background checks, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) research, and reciprocal carry.

...

The [Dickey] amendment allowed CDC-funded research but banned CDC advocacy. So, despite what gun-control advocates claim, research continued under the Dickey Amendment. Despite what Walz and other gun control backers say, neither the total number of papers nor pages devoted to firearms research decreased.

I've long argued that the Dickey Amendment never prohibited research and if the CDC figures that language did, in fact, mean they couldn't conduct gun research, then it meant it wasn't science but advocacy even in their own minds.

But Lott points out that the CDC did plenty of gun research during that time.

Now, was it a lie or was Walz simply wrong? After all, I consider it a lie when someone knows it's false but pushes it anyway, whereas someone who believes what they're saying is merely wrong. Walz saw the same media reports we all did, but his politics could well have led him to take the claims at face value. It's entirely possible he was just incorrect.

But considering some of his other nonsense, I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

As to Walz advocating for states to stop recognizing concealed handgun permits from other states (reciprocity), with more than 22 million concealed handgun permit holders nationwide, there are decades of data on the behavior of permit holders. Some states have particularly detailed data. In Florida and Texas, permit holders are convicted of firearms-related violations at one-twelfth the rate at which police officers are. And police are convicted at just one-twentieth of the rate for the general population. There is no evidence that any permit holder from another state has committed a gun crime in Minnesota.

Remember that in the quote above, reciprocity is especially called out by Walz as a problem.

It should be noted, though, that we haven't seen a single high-profile shooting that involved someone who was otherwise lawfully carrying a firearm due to reciprocity. There's no evidence of any rash of crime in general, either. In other words, it's a non-issue, especially when dealing with crime in places like Minneapolis.

So why is Walz even mentioning this?

Because the goal of gun control is simply to make it harder to keep and bear arms. Bearing arms currently means some degree of reciprocity in you're leaving your home state, which most of us do at some point or another. Ergo, reciprocity is bad.

Let's remember that concealed carry permits, even in the most permissible states in the nation, involve a criminal background check that insures the individual isn't a prohibited person. Anyone with a permit is someone who has never been convicted of any serious crime or even some misdemeanors. They're generally as close to a model citizen as you're going to find, which is born out by the research Lott cites.

Walz just doesn't like the fact that we can carry guns.

There's more that Lott destroys, but I can't really get into it because of fair use rules. I invite you to go and read the rest, especially the stupidity about universal background checks.

You'll be glad you did.