Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has done everything he can to position himself as a gun owner and avid hunter, someone we can trust to not take gun control too far.

Of course, any gun control is too far, but I digress.

However, his photo op to try and prove the point went disastrously wrong, as Cam noted on Monday.

And because it's never going to get old, here's the video of Walz being an absolute doofus while trying to load his shotgun.

He’s just like you.

pic.twitter.com/LIRhIkz0oj

— Some Welder 🇺🇸 (@SomeWelder) October 12, 2024

And this is the guy who said he could outshoot J.D. Vance.

LOL.

The internet being the internet, the video spread like wildfire and we have a ton of reactions to get to. Yes, much of it is just ridicule.

Following the three-hour hunt, CBS News reported Mr. Walz did not shoot a single pheasant.

Author and columnist Larry Alex Taunton, who often goes on Pheasant hunts and makes extra money assisting guides, said, “The A400 is a semi-auto shotgun. Many guides don’t allow semi-autos on a hunt because they can’t see at a distance that you’re ‘safe.’”

He said on X, “A break-action double-barrel is therefore preferred since they can tell when your gun cannot be fired (be it loaded or not). This is because the barrel is on a hinge that ‘breaks’ open to permit manual loading.”

Side-by-side images of the Looney Toons gun struggling character Elmer Fudd and the Minnesota governor looking at their shotguns appeared on social media, along with an animated gif of Mr. Walz inside the 1980s arcade game “Duck Hunt.”

“I’d like to congratulate Elmer Fudd, born in 1937, for the best day on social media in his entire career,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh on X.

“He has Tim Walz to thank for his resurgence, but in all the laughter about the Walz ‘pheasant hunting’ outing, I wanted to make sure we didn’t forget Mr. Fudd,” he wrote.

Honestly, I disagree about the Elmer Fudd references.

Elmer at least knows how to handle his shotgun like he knows what he's doing.

Now, some took issue with the term "kick-off" instead of calling it a recoil pad, but as noted above, that's something Beretta has, so Walz got that right, at least.

It's just about everything else he got wrong in handling the weapon like he was familiar with it.

In addition to the above, the NSSF's Mark Oliva had some thoughts.

Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz dressed the part. He even brought a shotgun. But that’s where his plan to hunt up votes from sportsmen and women missed the mark.

Turns out, Gov. Walz, like so many other politicians vying for political office, fail the authenticity test when it comes to earning voter trust that they’re just regular hunting guys, like the rest of us. They’re just politicians camouflaged in blaze orange, fumbling in a field. Hunters aren’t buying it. Voters aren’t either. Even liberal foreign media are making what should have been trigger time into a punch line.

Gov. Walz, the vice presidential nominee to Vice President Kamala Harris on the Harris-Walz ticket, invited media on the Pheasant Hunting Opener in Sleepy Eye, Minn. It’s a small city about 100 miles southwest of Minneapolis. There, Gov. Walz stepped into the field surrounded by dozens of cameras but very few shotguns to take a few pheasant. The whole event was a photo op aimed at bagging sportsmen and women voters who might still be on the fence. That’s when things fell apart.

Now, Walz has caught a lot of well-deserved flak for overstating his military service. He never deployed to a combat zone, despite talking about the weapons he supposedly carried in a warzone. He didn't actually retire as a command sergeant major either.

However, he did serve.

What happened at this event, however, now discredits literally anyone who tries to use their time in uniform to position themselves as an expert on firearms. Walz doesn't just say he's a veteran and supports gun control, but also uses his hunting prowess to justify it as well.

If a combat arms senior NCO (Walz was artillery) and supposedly avid outdoorsman is this clueless about how to operate a gun he's had for quite some time, you'll forgive me if I don't defer to the wisdom of some twerp who spent a four-year enlistment in supply when he says I should forfeit my rights for his own personal safety simply because he was in the military.

I was in the military, too, and literally everything I know about firearms I learned on my own.

And, to be fair, the reactions aren't going to stop anytime soon. This just smells like Walz's first of Michael Dukakis's head sticking out of a tank.