Earlier this week, newly internet-beloved Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was wearing a camo hat when he accepted Kamala Harris’ phone call asking him to join her on the presidential ticket. On Wednesday, the Harris campaign said that $1 million worth of “Harris/Walz”–logoed camo hats—looking very similar to a “Midwest Princess” cap sold by singer Chappell Roan—had been purchased. The popularity of the hat gestures toward Walz’s image as a Guy Who Shoots Guns. In her introduction of her running mate, Harris mentioned that Walz repeatedly won the congressional sharpshooting contest; he’s taken a dig at the Republican VP candidate, J.D. Vance, in a quip that doubles as a reminder that Walz routinely goes pheasant hunting in the state where he serves as governor.
For onlookers not as familiar with the internal politics of gun ownership, who hear that the governor served more than two decades in the National Guard, “Walz is a gun guy” may seem like an obvious bona fide to add to his list of Midwestern dad attributes (hot dish fan, turkey observer, state fair attendee). But as demonstrated by Vance’s new “stolen valor” line of attack against Walz, debuted on Wednesday, the GOP will try to poke holes in this image any way it can. At the time of this writing, these holes appear to be small at best, but we are in the early days of a fight that could be as protracted as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign targeting John Kerry’s record in 2004.
If the “stolen valor” attack is familiar, there’s another epithet that’s a little less so. The idea that Walz is a gun poser is apparent in a tweet from former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch, who accused Harris of “trying to burnish Walz’s Fudd credentials.” For those who aren’t hip-deep in American gun culture, those words might as well be in another language. What was Loesch on about? What is a “Fudd,” why did the post that Loesch quote-tweeted include that weird web comic, and why might Harris think putting a Fudd on the ticket would help win voters?
As a proud Fudd, I’m excited to see this word front and center in the national conversation. The term comes from the almost 90-year-old Looney Tunes cartoon character Elmer Fudd, a bumbling hunter constantly outwitted by his prey—from Bugs Bunny to Daffy Duck to his own backside. Operative here is that Elmer Fudd winds up shooting himself in the foot (a perennial outcome of the Looney Tunes episodes in which he appears) not because his quarry is particularly clever but rather because he is utterly incompetent.
The term Fudd appeared in Urban Dictionary as early as 2007, as an epithet slung by those at the 2A (short for Second Amendment, or gun enthusiast) community’s fringe in the direction of those of us who own one or two guns and enjoy hunting and shooting but don’t engage in competition shooting, don’t own a Liberty Safe with 57 firearms in it, and certainly see no need to acquire an AR-15. Fudds are far more likely to support the kinds of gun control legislation Walz advocates for, like universal background checks and red-flag laws. Many of us, myself included, are veterans of law enforcement or the military. Some of us have been to war or been hurt on jobs where we carried weapons professionally.
All that is irrelevant to the likes of Loesch. In the manner of the identitarian essentialism that defines almost all discourse in 2024, we are Fudds, root and branch. Quarterly range time for cops and the military is not enough to qualify as a “gun person” in the anti-Fudd world—an attitude summarized by this delightful comment on a Reddit post: “Your typical infantry meatbag spends more time shooting into a sock than they do on a range.” In the our-tribe-or-the-enemy world of public politics, you’re in the Boogaloo or you’re the incarnation of an incompetent cartoon character, more likely to hurt yourself with your firearm than the deer you’re futilely stalking.
So why would the Harris campaign pick Walz, a veteran, hunter, and lifelong gun owner who used to get the NRA’s coveted “A” rating for gun-policy positions before dramatically altering his stance after the 2017 Harvest music festival mass shooting in Las Vegas, then the Parkland school shooting the following year? Loesch is right that Walz is a classic Fudd—a commonsense shooter who is adamantly pro-2A but sees no reason for the average citizen to carry the same small arms he did in the National Guard. The Firearms Policy Coalition, which emerged in 2013 as an alternative that the anti–gun control fringe hoped might be more effective and less baggage-laden than the NRA, has already trotted out on X a cartoon of Walz as Elmer Fudd, mock-lamenting that it is “gonna get a lot of work” out of the image “over the next few months.” If, in choosing Walz, Harris wants to show America’s gun-owning public that she will meet them halfway, why would she do it with a Fudd? Is her campaign, as many in Loesch and the FPC’s camp seem to believe, utterly out of touch with regular folk outside big liberal cities?
I don’t think so. In picking Walz, the Harris team’s gun policy wonks are likely making a bet on something I have long suspected: that despite the shrieking of 2A’s lunatic fringe, most gun owners in America are Fudds. No study exists (indeed, the criteria haven’t been established) to grade America’s gun enthusiasts from 1 to 10 on a scientific Fudd scale. But there are hints that Fudds of Walz’s stripe form a group evocative of Nixon’s “silent majority”—we’re here, there’s a lot of us, and we don’t sound off on social media because it’s exhausting and occasionally dangerous.
There’s the famous 2017 Harvard and Northeastern study showing that 3 percent of the people own 50 percent of the nation’s guns, with half of gun owners owning only one or two. Further, the juxtaposition of rising rates of gun ownership with declining rates of background checks also suggests that fewer and fewer people own more and more guns. It’s important to note that the 2017 study is disputed and that although this data suggests a correlation, it is not causal proof; however, it certainly mirrors my experience of the majority of shooters in my rural New York town—people I encounter at the range or at events at the gun club, where many of my fellow firefighters shoot and socialize.
Most are staunch 2A advocates who regularly shoot and hunt and also keep guns for home defense. (Many, like me, own shotguns for this purpose—I keep a single Winchester pump-action SXP Defender because I’d far rather scare someone off by loudly racking the slide than actually having to pull the trigger.) Most are on the political right, many vote Trump, and all dig in hard at the thought of an America with European-style restrictions on firearm ownership and access. But they are a far cry from the likes of Loesch and former longtime CEO of the NRA Wayne LaPierre, and because, like me, they own only one or two guns for hunting, sporting, or home defense, support modest gun control legislation, and aren’t really interested in getting into military-grade weapons, they would certainly be decried as Fudds by many on 2A’s more vocal fringe.
Personally, I doubt any of the people I’m describing will be swayed into the Harris camp by Walz’s presence on the ticket, but Harris doesn’t need more voters in solidly blue New York. She needs swing voters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Harris is likely betting that when it comes to gun policy, many of them will be persuaded by seeing a fellow Fudd at the Democratic nominee’s elbow. And when it comes to service, they will note Walz’s years in the National Guard and his advocacy for veterans in Congress and appreciate it. In Walz they may see a member of their own silent majority—responsible gun owners who don’t shout online, threaten civil war, deride armed professionals for a lack of firearm-related enthusiasm, or envision the United States as a future Mogadishu, where only recently the government was forced to ban citizens from carrying military-grade weaponry in the streets. We, the Fudds, are relentlessly committed to what we view as reasonable compromises that could reduce the horrific number of American gun deaths, unparalleled elsewhere in the developed world. Is Tim Walz the guy to win our votes? And will those votes be enough to put Kamala Harris in the White House? Only time will tell.