2026 isn't a presidential election year, but it's an election year just the same. Midterms for the US House and some Senate seats up for grabs, as well as a lot of state seats, including governorships. That's the case in Minnesota, which just saw a contentious fight on the topic of gun control.
Now that it's over, it's over, right?
Wrong, because campaign season is upon us, and that's where this particular battle in Minnesota is moving to.
Moments after passing a complex bipartisan deal to end the 2026 legislative session Sunday night, Minnesota lawmakers moved seamlessly from legislating to campaign-season messaging.
Democratic leaders projected more frustration than satisfaction, saying the campaign will be primarily about what lawmakers failed to pass — namely, new restrictions on guns or a response to the winter federal immigration crackdown.
Republicans more loudly celebrated the work of divided government after DFLers had total control of the Legislature in 2023 and 2024. They cited cuts to car-tab fees, property taxes and the passage of many of their top priorities for combating fraud in social services programs.
...Two issues that fired up DFLers the most heading into this year’s legislative session were responses to the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School and the federal Operation Metro Surge.
Democrats got very little of what they wanted on those issues. DFLers staged a sit-in to push for gun control and channeled outrage over the impact of the immigration crackdown into months of passionate advocacy. The Legislature passed some school safety measures, but House DFL Leader Zack Stephenson called the lack of major action on guns or the ICE surge “major disappointments.”
So what's going to happen in the coming weeks is that we're going to hear a lot of rhetoric surrounding guns and gun control from both sides in the more hotly contested seats.
Some of that is likely to be absolute stupidity being bandied about as "common sense gun reform," or however they want to phrase it, but it's still going to be something that should qualify the speaker as being mentally disabled. And we're going to probably talk about it, because that's what we do.
But the truth of the matter is that guns were already a contentious issue in Minnesota before the Annunciation shooting, and while there is some polling that suggests gun control is popular outside of the major cities, that polling doesn't tell us if that will guide anyone's vote in November. That's important, because if guns aren't the driving issue for some of those people, but they want to see support for ICE or something else that the DFL is against, then expect there to be little to no change in the current makeup.
The problem, though, is that it doesn't take all that much of a shakeup to change things.
As it stands, the House is a 50-50 split between the two parties, so every seat is going to matter, and if the DFL gets control of the House, then it's unlikely we're not going to see a lot of changes there. Yeah, the DFL couldn't get it done two years ago when they had control, but I'm not hopeful that's going to be the status quo going forward, particularly after Annunciation.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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