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Greatest Generation’s defining moment: Saving the world.

Baby Boomer’s defining moment: A drug-fueled orgy.

Overrated.

Aerial shot of Woodstock in 1969.

The guy who shows up looking like he’s just stepped out of an LL Bean catalog is always the most dangerous to himself and others.

Tim Walz’s Hunting Gaffe Explained

I’ve done a lot of pheasant hunting. As a high schooler, I made extra $ assisting guides on pheasant hunts: getting the hunters in the field, flushing game for them to easily shoot, and making sure they are safe. And much more since those days.

You learn to spot the guys who are a potential danger to themselves and others. Everything about them is new: the shotgun, the gear, the clothing. They look like they’ve just stepped out of an LL Bean catalog. This isn’t meant as a criticism. But if you’re leading the hunt it’s a visual clue that he’s probably new to this and, in his excitement, he went to his local hunting store bought all the gear in an effort to look like one of the guys. It tells you to keep an eye on him and to be ready to offer quiet instruction so as not to embarrass him.

I don’t fault Walz for clearly being inexperienced with firearms and hunting. Anyone who is proficient in either had to learn sometime. For most of us, I think, the scorn heaped upon him is due to the fraudulent nature of it all. What VP candidate takes a day off to go hunting? Well, they don’t unless they see it as a photo op. Dems realize Americans think Walz is a beta male weirdo, so some campaign genius said, “I got it! He’ll go hunting! He’ll look manly!”

With the exception of “The Natural,” I generally hate sports movies because the lead actor usually looks like he’s never played sports in his life. Watching Walz handle a shotgun is like watching Keanu Reeves throw a football in “The Replacements.” It’s painful. (Robert Redford was believable as an aging baseball player because he clearly played the game as a boy. Same with Kevin Costner in “For the Love of the Game.”)

In this video, Walz appears to be having difficulty loading his shotgun while on a pheasant hunt. He tells the reporter, whose questioning tone suggests she’s not buying any of this, that it’s a Beretta A400.

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.” 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. And this is very important for safety. I would wager that most accidental shotgun deaths involve semi-autos.

This is all the more important in pheasant hunting. Unlike, say, deer hunting where you might sit in a tree all day long by yourself, pheasant hunting is typically done in large groups where the hunters are arranged in a crescent and marched through a field toward “blockers,” that is, hunters who stand still in a line. The idea is to drive the birds into the blockers and force them to flight.

Hunting in such close proximity with other hunters can be dangerous for a variety of reasons: the birds fly parallel to the ground at head level, excitable hunters start blasting away at everything that moves or don’t wait for the birds to reach a safe height, accidental discharges, etc. A guide wants to see that your weapon is open and therefore inoperable in all but the hunt.

The loading port on the A400 is beneath the weapon near the trigger guard. This type of loading is an acquired skill, and Walz doesn’t have it. (I’ll add that Walz says he bought it for trap shooting. In this he is correct. I wouldn’t want to use an A400 pheasant hunting. It’s not a field gun. It’s heavy. But it’s excellent for clays.) He fumbles around and, sensing he’s making a fool of himself, he appears to stop before he’s managed to get it loaded.

As you can see, this carefully choreographed hunt wasn’t so carefully choreographed. It’s become Tim Walz’s Michael Dukakis-in-the-tank moment. It’s also noteworthy that in this gaffe Democrats, for all their faux rage about “toxic masculinity,” unwittingly pay homage to masculinity and its appeal. They do know what it is. They just don’t know how to practice it.