JD Vance (R-OH) slammed Tim Walz (D-MN) over his comments about Iraq and called him a liar to “stolen valor.”
Walz, who’s serving as running mate to Vice President Kamala Harris, stands accused of carrying firearms he said that he had “carried in war.”
“I spent 25 years in the Army, and I hunt. I’ve been voting for commonsense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war that I carried in war are only carried in war,” Walz said in a video posted by the Harris campaign.
Walz began his military service in 1981, and he retired from the rank of command sergeant major with the 1st Battalion,125th Field Artillery in 2005. A
“I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did. I know that,” Walz said, acknowledging that he never saw combat. “I willingly say that I got far more out of the military than they got out of me, from the GI Bill to leadership opportunities to everything else.”
Walz retired just days after receiving a battalion warning order to deploy to Iraq. Walz was replaced in the deployment by another service member, Thomas Behrends.
“When your country calls, you are supposed to run into battle, not the other way,” the retired command sergeant major told the New York Post. “He ran away. It’s sad.”
Walz entered politics after retiring from the military, winning election to a congressional seat and being sworn into office in 2007. As carried by Minnesota Public Radio, he specialized in heavy artillery despite having never faced combat and earned sharpshooting and grenade commendations.
Walz’s comments in the Harris campaign video were slammed on social media, with many noting that he would give a different kind of interview today if asked about his military service.
Walz represented a large, mostly rural district in Congress from 2006 to 2019 and was an outspoken proponent of the Second Amendment and hunting rights. He was lauded by pro-gun groups such as the NRA, which graded him an “A” on gun rights. He was also named 1 of “America’s Top 20 Politicians” by Gun & Ammo magazine in the year 2016.
In succeeding years, Walz’s views on guns evolved, inciting fierce criticism from the state’s gun-rights community.
After Harris picked him as her running mate in August, the NRA said Walz was a “political chameleon” and later told Fox News Digital he “lived several public lives.”
In the aftermath of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Walz said he would send about $18,000 that his campaign received from the NRA to charity. He went on to support a ban on so-called assault weapons for the next year while he pushed for gun control as one of several Democrats in the video.
Walz himself wrote in a 2018 op-ed that he was “evolving” on guns but underscored his own commitment to reform.
“To finally come together to end gun violence, we’ll need a new approach. We’ll need to build a coalition we haven’t seen before: rural, urban, suburban and exurban folks; gun owners and gun-violence survivors; hunters and advocates and police officers and the young people who are stepping up right now. We’ll need a coalition of folks of good faith who haven’t seen eye to eye but respect the different ways of life in every corner of our state,” Walz wrote in an op-ed back in 2018.
