Tim Walz isn’t the only Democrat candidate trying to reinvent himself on the campaign trail. Montana’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ryan Busse is massaging his own history of supporting gun control in his bid to defeat incumbent Gov. Greg Gianforte this November.
Busse spent almost two decades as a sales executive at Kimber before leaving the company in 2020, supposedly because he was fed up with the “rampant fear-mongering, racism, hardline conservative politics, massive profits from semi-automatic weapons sales, and McCarthyesque policing” he saw in the firearms industry. Busse went to work for Joe Biden’s campaign as an advisor on gun issues before landing a gig as a senior advisor at the gun control group Giffords. In 2021, he released the book Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America.
But while the anti-gun group has endorsed his campaign, Busse isn’t bragging about bagging the support of gun control activists in his latest campaign ad. Instead, he’s touting the “three million” guns he helped to sell before he embraced the gun control lobby’s ideology.
In his latest video, Ryan Busse drops his head and looks through the scope of his rifle and fires off a round.
“I’m a gun guy,” he says after the shot. “I sold 3 million of them. Hell, I helped design this rifle. I can’t spot someone who can’t shoot straight a mile away,” Busse says, looking the camera, leaning on his rifle.
Busse, the Democratic gubernatorial challenger to Gov. Greg Gianforte then goes on to criticize Gianforte for hiking property taxes in Montana and, he claims, lowering his own.
The ad ends with Busse taking aim at a target again, this one loaded with Tannerite. An explosion ensues.
It’s telling that Busse uses a rifle as a prop in his campaign ad attacking Gianforte over property taxes. While Busse claims to be a “gun guy”, in recent years he’s spent most of his time and energy promoting gun control, not the right to keep and bear arms. And while Busse is now touting his career as a sales executive for a gun company, he was singing a very different tune until he started thinking seriously about running for governor.
Just two years ago Busse wrote that he “became more and more disturbed by the sort of firearms the industry was selling, how it was selling them, and to whom.”
By 2021, I had quit the gun industry. I now work on the outside to alert the American public to the dangers I see in this marketing. To me, it undeniably created a culture of extremism that encouraged a new type of “tactical” mass shooter. America is seeing the deadly results of the violence incubated by these dark advertising fantasies.
So why isn’t that Busse’s campaign message to Montana’s voters? Simple: he wants to win, and running as an out-and-proud gun controller is political poison in Big Sky country.
There hasn’t been much polling of Montana’s gubernatorial race, but the few publicly available surveys show Busse getting his butt kicked by Gianforte, who leads the Democrat by more than 20 points. That helps to explain why Busse’s calling himself a “gun guy” in his latest campaign ad instead of touting his endorsement from Giffords. He may be running for governor, but he’s also running away from his close relationship with the gun control lobby; including his paid testimony in support of anti-gun measures like bans on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines.
