From an NRA ‘A’ Rating To Calling for Reform: How Tim Walz Shifted on Guns While Running for Governor

A day after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Tim Walz was in the nation’s capital, among a crowd that was protesting the newly elected president. Walz was serving his sixth term in the House of Representatives at the time, representing Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District.

“He kind of just shows up to check it out,” Sam Brodey, a journalist for MinnPost from 2015-2019, says in the above excerpt from FRONTLINE’s documentary The VP Choice: Vance vs. Walz, which premiered on Oct. 8, 2024, and is now available to watch online. “I think he just wanted to understand where his party was at this critical moment.”

Months later, Walz announced his campaign for governor. As he worked to secure a victory in the Democratic primary and the election itself, he would shift left on a major area in which his record was out of step with his party: guns.

“Anyone with an ‘A’ rating from the NRA is considered to, you know, have a scarlet letter,” Brodey says.

The VP Choice: Vance vs. Walz examines Walz’s evolution on guns and other pivotal moments in Walz’s and Sen. JD Vance’s political lives as they run for vice president.

As the excerpt explores, for a decade, Walz had survived as a political moderate in his right-leaning district. The National Rifle Association gave Walz an ‘A’ rating for years, while he served in Congress.

Minnesota Star Tribune’s Briana Bierschbach says, “There were a lot of hunters and fishermen and -women in his district, and he was one of them himself.”

In the midst of Walz’s campaign for governor, mass shootings began to mount, and the gun issue came to the forefront for Democrats.

The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history happened in October 2017, when a gunman opened fire at a music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 concertgoers and injuring hundreds of others. Months later, in February 2018, a teen gunman killed 17 students at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

Walz faced pressure, both politically and personally, especially from his teenage daughter, Hope.

“I think the school shootings struck a note,” Nick Frentz, Walz’s friend and a Minnesota state senator, says in the excerpt. He recalls, “I remember the story that Hope had come home from school after a school shooting, and she was very unhappy. And they have a tremendous relationship.”

The other factor influencing Walz’s political shift, Frentz says, was the change in Walz’s constituency.

“The people that he represented started to change. Far more voices asking for restrictions on guns, restrictions on Second Amendment rights,” Frentz says.

It all added up, Frentz says, to Walz’s decision to “go a different direction” on guns.

In a Facebook post following the Parkland shooting, Walz wrote about listening to parents, students and community members — and vowed that as governor, he would build coalitions to “end the obstruction, get the NRA out of the way, and get us to the common-sense solutions that we all agree on …” Walz also voiced his support for a statewide ban on assault weapons.

When pressed on the local news to explain his shift, he said, “These are things that don’t infringe upon people’s rights to keep and bear arms in a manner that allows them to do what they need to do, but it does bring another measure of potentially — and I am not naive — potentially stopping one of these shootings.”

“It was an argument that landed for people at the time,” Brodey says. “And I think Democrats were ready to accept his explanation.”

As the excerpt reveals, Walz’s new approach worked. He became the Democratic nominee during his party’s primary and was later elected governor.

For the full story, watch The VP Choice: Vance vs. Walz:

The documentary premiered on Oct. 8, 2024. It is available on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTINE’s YouTube channel, the PBS App and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. The VP Choice: Vance vs. Walz is a FRONTLINE production with Schonder Productions and Left/Right Docs. The director is Gabrielle Schonder. The producers are Anya Bourg and Laura Kuhn. The writers are Anya Bourg, Gabrielle Schonder and James Jacoby. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.

This story has been updated.