Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz says he’s calling lawmakers back to the state capitol for a special session in response to the shooting at a Miinneapolis church “one way or another,” though at the moment it doesn’t appear that he has the votes to pass a ban on semi-automatic long guns and commonly owned magazines.
As Bryan Strawser of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus told me on Tuesday’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co podcast, even when Democrats had complete control of Minnesota state government they didn’t have enough support to pass a ban on so-called assault weapons thanks to a few rural Democrat-Farmer-Labor state senators. Even some Democratic lawmakers have acknowledged that the votes aren’t there for the kind of sweeping gun ban Walz wants to sign, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try to twist some arms to get a gun ban bill to his desk.
“There’s going to be people will proudly stand in there and on that assault weapon ban go up on the board, they’ll vote, ‘nope that’s not the problem’ … but we’ll do that … I am most concerned that we move to take action. We put it to the vote in front of Minnesotans,” Walz said Tuesday.
Newly elected House Leader Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids, said Tuesday that he would also like a vote on some gun control — regardless of whether it will pass.
“I think that the public deserves to know where people stand, so I don’t know that we would preclude having a special session just because we don’t have Republican movements going in,” Stephenson said.
Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, addressed that some of her Democratic colleagues have blocked gun control in the past during a DFL trifecta. And while she didn’t assure that all of her caucus’ votes are there, she said she thinks “life’s circumstances intervene and can change both hearts and minds.”
Stephenson’s all in on a gun ban, which isn’t surprising given his warped view of the Second Amendment.
Right before he claimed 2A only applied to muskets and that the DFL didn’t believe citizens should possess semi-automatic rifles https://t.co/wOetPHeDiv
— MN Gun Owners Caucus (@mnguncaucus) September 10, 2025
Republicans, meanwhile, are offering a legislative package that includes increased funding for school security and mental health, which would do far more to combat “gun violence” than banning commonly owned firearms. A 2021 report found the state was dead last in the number of psychiatric beds per capita, with child and adolescent units operating at full capacity and experiencing lengthy delays in finding space for those in crisis.
Of course, Democrats did nothing to fix that problem back when they had a governing trifecta, and it remains to be seen if they’ll back the GOP’s push to expand access to mental health care and bolster school security, or if they’ll tie their support to a Republican “compromise” on some form of gun control. Walz is certainly talking more about a gun ban than mental health at the moment.
“We have weapons of war and high-capacity magazines on the streets. They should not be there,” Walz said after meeting with legislative leaders on Tuesday afternoon. “We have folks that have firearms that should not have them, and we should be doing everything in our power to do something about that.”
… Republicans on the committee that controls what bills come to the House floor are unlikely to allow gun bills to be put up for debate, said GOP House Floor Leader Harry Niska, R-Anoka.
But Walz wants lawmakers to take a public vote, saying families of the murdered children are calling for action. The renewed demand for action on gun violence also comes after a summer that began with the assassination of House DFL leader Melissa Hortman.
“We have a dead speaker of the House and a husband,” Walz said. “We have two dead children. … There comes a time to do it.”
Walz is utterly shameless in exploiting tragedy to advance his anti-gun agenda. He’s presenting his proposed gun ban in the most emotional terms possible: if you don’t support banning semi-automatic firearms then you must be okay with dead kids. Republicans in the legislature have taken the high road to date, but at some point they’re going to have to push back on the governor’s false narrative. It’s not enough to offer an alternative to what Walz is demanding. They have to be vocal about why Walz is wrong; these aren’t “weapons of war” he’s talking about, they’re guns that are found in the homes of good people across the state of Minnesota, who use them for a variety of lawful purposes.
Banning those guns won’t address the evil inside someone’s heart and the sickness in their head. It certainly won’t stop a committed killer from carrying out an attack. The deadliest school shooting in U.S. history involved handguns, not AR-15s, and horrific events like Columbine happened in the midst of the federal ban on “assault weapons” back in the 1990s.
None of that matters to Walz and his anti-gun allies, though. He’s been pushing for a semi-auto ban for years, and if he has to exploit the death of a few kids to get a bill to his desk so be it.
Editor’s Note: Anti-gun politicians like Walz are intent on exploiting every tragedy they can to attack gun owners and our Second Amendment rights.
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