Versions of this have been said before, but it bears repeating: Sportsmen wear camouflage to not be seen, while anti-gun politicians wear it to be seen. Such is the case with the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
This summer, the Harris-Walz campaign’s merchandise store released a camo baseball cap with the pair’s names printed in hunter orange. To hear it from the fawning regime press, the mere existence of a camo hat bearing the names of the most anti-Second Amendment presidential ticket in history is some sort of achievement. The camouflage campaign hat, along with Walz’s folksy affectation, are supposed to get ordinary American voters to forget about the ticket’s extreme views.
The New York City-based Rolling Stone proclaimed, “The hat reclaims the rural and Southern identity that mainstream Democrats have long ignored.” According to MSNBC, the hat helps define “Walz’s place in the Harris campaign”; that “He is to be that Midwest everyman.”
Of course, no amount of camouflage can disguise Harris and Walz’s radical anti-gun records.
During her failed 2020 presidential campaign, Harris repeatedly stated that she supports banning and confiscating commonly owned semi-automatic firearms, including the AR-15. As San Francisco district attorney, Harris argued that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms.
For all his down-home posturing, Walz also wants to ban common semi-automatic firearms. The anti-gun extremist even inflated his military record to argue for a gun ban. In 2018, Walz told a crowd, “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.” The statement conflated the types of full-auto-capable rifles typically issued to soldiers in the U.S. military with semi-automatic-only rifles available to law-abiding civilians. Worse, Walz never served in a combat zone, and the campaign was forced to admit that he “misspoke.”
Gun owners are used to this sort of camo-clad subterfuge.
On more than one occasion in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton played the part of a duck hunter. In 1993, the Los Angeles Times described one of these outings as an “image-making exercise,” noting that “President Clinton sacrificed a duck to the cause of gun control.”
Following the 2000 presidential election, in which Vice President Al Gore lost to George W. Bush, Clinton blamed gun owners. Clinton told CBS’ Dan Rather, “[I]n at least five states I can think of, the NRA had a decisive influence.”
In 2004, Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry was determined to avoid Gore’s fate. The anti-gun Massachusetts senator with the Boston Brahmin accent tried to affect an everyman image by being photographed handling shotguns. This farce was made even more absurd when, at a Labor Day rally in West Virginia, Kerry accepted a Remington Model 11-87 shotgun that the senator’s own legislation would have prohibited.
In an unsuccessful last-ditch effort to woo gun owners, Kerry went on a widely publicized October goose hunt in Ohio. The Washington Times described the event as “tightly choreographed,” while The New York Times called the scene a “hunting photo-op.” As an NRA official explained at the time, “Sen. Kerry is a fraud. Spending an hour in a goose blind doesn’t make up for 20 years of voting against hunters.”
Similarly, this most recent cynical effort to hoodwink normal Americans likely stems from anti-gun Democrats’ abysmal performance with rural voters. A few days after Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) 2021 victory, The New York Times ran a story with a headline lamenting that, while Democrats had thought they had “bottomed out” in rural communities, the election in the Old Dominion showed “it wasn’t the bottom.” A similar item from Politico carried the title, “Rural Democrats stare into the abyss after Virginia.”
The New York Times article cited Virginia’s Bath County, a rural jurisdiction along the state’s border with West Virginia, as emblematic of this political reality. The article explained, “Many of the ideas and issues that animate the Democratic base can be off-putting in small towns or untethered to rural life. Voters in Bath County, many of whom are avid hunters and conservative evangelicals, have long opposed liberal stances on gun rights … .”
Youngkin’s opponent, New York-native Terry McAuliffe, ran on an anti-gun platform that included banning commonly owned semi-automatic firearms and their magazines, restricting the right to carry and using tax dollars to fund gun-control propaganda.
Gun owners could be forgiven for taking anti-gun politicians’ unconvincing camo-costumed trickery as an insult to their intelligence. The better way to understand it is as an acknowledgement of the power hunters and other gun owners have over American elections. Informed gun owners should take this as further motivation to supply their families, friends, neighbors and other freedom-minded individuals with the facts about the threat Harris and Walz pose to the Second Amendment, their way of life and their personal property.
