Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and U.S. Senator JD Vance of Ohio seem poised to spar over gun policy during the vice presidential debate on October 1 — only weeks after two high-profile mass shootings and a second attempted assassination on former President Donald Trump.
Where do the vice presidential candidates stand on this issue? We’ve assembled this primer on their records.
Walz’s evolution
Walz is a hunter and 24-year veteran of the Army National Guard. He began his political career in 2007 as a center-left member of the U.S. House from a rural, conservative district along Minnesota’s southern border. Throughout his five congressional terms, he earned A ratings from the National Rifle Association and rarely supported gun violence prevention measures.
Walz signed a 2009 letter opposing a bill to ban assault weapons, and two years later, he co-sponsored legislation to allow permit holders to carry concealed firearms across state lines.
After a gunman shot and killed 20 students and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, Walz told Minnesota Public Radio that he would be open to rethinking his position on certain gun issues, but little in his voting record suggests he materially changed before his campaign for governor. He did not join his Democratic House colleagues cosponsoring legislation to ban assault weapons or to expand background checks on gun sales in the months after Sandy Hook, and in several instances he continued to show support for looser gun restrictions. Walz backed multiple bills aimed at preventing the District of Columbia from imposing more stringent gun regulations, and in 2017, he voted to allow veterans to buy guns after being declared mentally incapable of managing their own affairs.
Twice in Congress, Walz supported allowing floor debate on gun control measures, but he never voted on the bills themselves because they stalled in committee.
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It wasn’t until his 2017 run for governor that Walz articulated full-throated support for gun reform. The campaign required Walz to appeal to a much larger, more diverse pool of voters than those living in his Trump-leaning congressional district. Minnesota hadn’t voted to send a Republican to the White House since Richard Nixon, and by 2017, the state’s voters overwhelmingly supported reforms like universal background checks on gun sales.
The gubernatorial race also overlapped with two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history: those at the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in Las Vegas, where more than 400 people were shot, 60 of them fatally; and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed and another 17 wounded.
Walz acknowledged that his new constituency and the mass shootings motivated him to reverse his stance. “I’ve listened hard to students, parents, law enforcement, teachers, sportsmen and survivors of gun violence, in every corner of Minnesota,” he wrote in a Minnesota Star-Tribune editorial after the Parkland shooting. “[W]hile they have different perspectives, I’ve heard them all say one thing loud and clear: This. Needs. To. Stop.” In 2018 — his last in Congress — he cosponsored an assault weapons ban for the first time.
Minnesota gun rights groups and Walz’s Democratic competitors for governor accused him of changing his views out of political expediency, but in his six years in office, Walz has fulfilled several campaign promises. He signed bills to establish universal background checks and a red flag law to temporarily disarm people deemed a threat to themselves or others. In June, he approved increasing penalties for people who straw-purchase firearms on behalf of prohibited buyers, and a ban on binary triggers, which allow semiautomatic firearms to shoot nearly as fast as machine guns.
Vance’s rapid ascent
Vance hasn’t had nearly as long a political career as his Democratic competitor. He rose to national prominence in 2016 with the publication of his book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” which earned him a paid commentator gig on CNN.
After the Parkland shooting, Vance signaled some support for red flag laws. He told an audience at an Ohio golf club that the government “should make it easier to take those guns out of the hands of people who are about to use them to murder large numbers of people,” but went on to say he worried that such an effort could compromise people’s Second Amendment rights.
Vance embraced a more far-right view of gun rights during his 2022 run for Senate. In a survey circulated by the American Firearms Association and the group Ohio Gun Owners, he expressed opposition to assault weapons bans, universal background checks, and red flag laws. Vance also said he supported loosening restrictions on using guns in self-defense and abolishing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency tasked with combating gun trafficking and regulating gun dealers. The NRA contributed $500,000 to his campaign.
In the Senate, Vance joined 23 of his Republican colleagues in pushing legislation to make it more difficult for the ATF to shut down gun dealers that break the law.
Though he was not a member of the Senate when the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was passed in June 2022, Vance said he would have voted against it. The law provides billions in federal funding for community gun violence prevention programs, red flag laws, and school safety initiatives, and enhances background checks on gun buyers under 21 years of age, among other provisions.
“I think red flag laws, in particular, they certainly are a slippery slope,” Vance told the Breitbart News Daily podcast in 2022. “They also don’t solve the problem of gun violence.”
Vance has repeatedly claimed that increased background checks would do nothing to reduce gun violence, and when the Senate considered banning bump stocks earlier this year, he called the effort a “huge distraction” meant to solve a “fake problem.” After the fatal shooting of two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, in September, Vance said that school shootings were “a fact of life.”
Research into the efficacy of enhanced background checks and red flag laws has found moderate evidence that both policies reduce homicide.
To decrease shootings, Vance has called for beefing up law enforcement — especially around schools — and increasing access to mental health treatment, though he has not offered specifics for either plan.