In an unscripted moment last weekend, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) perfectly encapsulated the fundamental fraud at the heart of Vice President Kamala Harris‘s presidential campaign.
Speaking at a high school gym in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Walz was in the middle of a riff about gun control when a member of the audience needed medical attention. After the brief disruption, Walz tried to get his speech back on track, claiming, “They want to tell you to just get over it — it’s a fact of life, this is the way it is,” Walz said of recent school shootings. “[Harris] has simply said it doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can’t afford four more years of this.”
The first thing to note about this Walz statement is that it is premised on a lie that was first told by the Associated Press, then retracted, but is still retold by Harris and Walz.
It originates from a Sep. 5 speech Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) gave in Arizona in which he said, “If these psychos are going to go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it. We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it. I don’t like that this is a fact of life.”
The Associated Press took that comment, cut it, and posted that “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life.’” Confronted with the fact that its reporter cut out Vance saying, “I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” the Associated Press deleted its post. But the damage was already done, as it always is in such cases. Democrats seized on the Associated Press distortion and have since been saying, as Walz did, that Republicans just want people “to just get over” school shootings because “it’s a fact of life.”
That’s not what Vance said. He said gun control will not stop school shootings and that we therefore need to spend more on security for schools, including by putting more police in schools, a policy that Harris and Walz oppose.
What is far more telling about Walz’s statement was his assertion that “we can’t afford four more years of this.” He seems to have forgotten who has been in the White House for the past four years. It is his running mate, Harris, not his opponent, Donald Trump.
The Biden-Harris administration has acted on school shootings, too. In June 2022, in response to the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which created incentives for states to pass red flag laws that make it easier for concerned citizens to petition courts to take away weapons owned by people the court deems a threat. The legislation made it illegal for boyfriends convicted of domestic abuse to own a gun, not just former spouses. It created an expanded background check for gun purchasers between the ages of 18 and 21.
Biden later signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to crack down on gun sellers who don’t perform legally required background checks, and he directed federal agencies to make the public aware of state red flag flaws.
All this new gun control has not stopped or reduced school shootings. The Biden-Harris gun control agenda has failed.
Walz wants voters to forget this. He wants voters in Bethlehem and elsewhere to ignore the glaring fact that Harris’s agenda on gun control has been in effect the last four years and has failed.
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As importantly, the entire Harris campaign is premised on extending this amnesia across the policy spectrum. Her campaign slogan is, “A New Way Forward.” New compared to what? She has differed from Biden only by wanting more rather than less of what he is offering and has failed to work — more of his misgovernance and useless drift. The last four years have seen inflation erode paychecks. More of that? Communities have been overrun by migrants illegally released into the country by the Biden-Harris administration. More of that?
Walz is right. We can’t afford another four more years of Harris.