In just a few sentences, Gov. Tim Walz made false claims about assault weapons, background checks, CDC research, and reciprocal carry.

“I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt,” Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., declared in 2018. “I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks, we can do CDC research, we can make sure that we don’t reciprocal carry among states. And we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are allowed to be carried.” In just a few sentences, Walz made false claims about assault weapons, background checks, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) research, and reciprocal carry.

First, take his claims about “weapons of war.” Put aside that Walz never was in war, let alone carried a weapon in war. The term “assault weapon” is nonsensical. Even the Associated Press Stylebook, which carries water for Democrat narratives, recognizes that fact. As the AP acknowledges, the term conveys “little meaning” and is “highly politicized.”

Politicians will continue calling AR-15s “weapons of war” and “assault weapons,” as Walz does. Many seem to think “AR” means assault rifle when it stands for ArmaLite rifle, after the company that developed it in the 1950s. But at least some of the media is now recognizing that “AR- or AK-style rifles designed for the civilian market,” as the AP Stylebook says, are fundamentally different than military weapons.

“The preferred term for a rifle that fires one bullet each time the trigger is pulled, and automatically reloads for a subsequent shot, is a semi-automatic rifle,” according to the AP Stylebook. “An automatic rifle continuously fires rounds if the trigger is depressed until its ammunition is exhausted. Avoid assault rifle and assault weapon, which are highly politicized terms that generally refer to AR- or AK-style rifles designed for the civilian market, but convey little meaning about the actual functions of the weapon.”

AR-15s and AK-47s are frequently called “military-style weapons.” But the key is “style” — they are like military guns in how they look, not in how they operate. The guns are not the fully automatic machine guns used by the military, but rather semi-automatic versions of those guns.

For someone who says he is a hunter, Walz surely knows this. The weapons he wants to ban operate exactly the same as any hunting rifle he would use. The civilian AR-15 uses essentially the same sorts of bullets as small game-hunting rifles. It also fires at the same rate (one bullet per pull of the trigger), the bullet travels at the same speed, and does the same damage. Still, no military anywhere uses the civilian versions of either of these guns.

But hunting isn’t the critical issue here. Semi-automatic weapons protect people and save lives. Single-shot rifles require manual reloading after every round, and people may not have the time to reload their gun when they face multiple attackers or fire and miss.

Most mass public shootings don’t use any type of rifle. Fifty-three percent involve only handguns, and only 17 percent solely involve rifles of any variety.

It should be little wonder that banning “assault” rifles did very little. During the 1994-2004 ban, the number of attacks with “assault weapons” didn’t fall, and there was virtually no change in total mass shootings.