There’s been a certain degree of tension between the Second Amendment community and the hunting community. There’s absolutely a certain degree of overlap there, to be sure, but many hunters exist who actually want to see gun control. There are also gun owners who have no sympathy for hunters and their issues.
Yet it seems one thing can unite members of both groups.
That became clear when the Harris-Walz campaign tried to reach out to outdoorsmen and women this week. As Cam wrote about yesterday, the new group Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz appears to be nothing more than an astroturf effort by Democrats and gun control activists. The National Shooting Sports Foundation’s Larry Keane says hunters aren’t buying the bogus outreach.
With less than a month to go before November’s presidential election, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris launched “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz,” an apparent last-gasp effort to dent former president Donald Trump’s advantage with male voters.
The coalition was formally launched with a Monday virtual call, organized by the Democratic National Committee, where speakers addressed “protecting our land and water, promoting outdoor recreation, and standing up for common-sense gun laws.” The call came shortly after Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, took reporters on a pheasant hunt on which he struggled to load his shotgun and didn’t fire a shot.
The campaign’s push to win over hunters, leaders of hunting groups told the Washington Free Beacon, flies in the face of the Biden-Harris administration’s track record on hunting issues. Since taking office in 2021, the administration has issued broad restrictions on the types of weapons hunters can use for recreation on public lands, blocked hunting on federal lands, and backed legislation that curbed shooting education in public schools. And sportsmen haven’t forgotten.
“Joe Biden and his anointed successors of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have a long history of anti-Second Amendment rhetoric and actions that leave sportsmen and women with concerns that can hardly be patched up by talks of a coalition and sending Tim Walz into a staged pheasant hunt,” Lawrence Keane, the senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told the Free Beacon.
“Actions speak louder than words, and these actions show that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz are no friends of the law-abiding gun owners that make up the American sport shooting and hunting community,” Keane said. “Those same Americans will not fall for a last-minute ploy that is not a reflection of any genuine belief in Americans’ right to protect themselves and concocted in reaction to abysmal polling data.”
The NSSF is pro-gun and pro-hunting, obviously, but Keane brings up a lot of good points about Harris’s history as part of the Biden administration. This administration has been vehemently anti-hunting as well as anti-gun, and Harris has suggested that she doesn’t see any reason to do anything differently than they’ve been done since Biden took office.
How that counts as “a new way forward” is beyond me, but whatever.
Later, Keane also touches on the fact that while the target of any Harris administration will start out to be things like so-called assault weapons, it won’t end there. Those who want to ban some guns will invariably turn their attention to whatever’s left while also trying to lay the groundwork to do so. Just look at what’s been going on in Connecticut for an example.
Those hunters who think it’s fine to ban guns so long as their hunting rifles are left alone would do well to remember that AR-15s were legal for decades before someone decided they needed to be banned, all because of an initially small number of incidents (it’s still small in comparison to everything else going on, but it was really small when they first started calling for them). All it’ll take are a few “snipers” and suddenly hunting rifles will be on the chopping block.
So draw the line now because once they get rolling, they’re not going to just wake up one day and stop.
