Minnesota Governor Tim Walz holds up a just-signed gun reform bill on May 19, 2023, at the state Capitol in St. Paul. Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP
By Chip Brownlee, The Trace, July 5, 2023
About a year ago, as Minnesota was getting ready to receive an influx of federal dollars from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, I called up state Representative Kelly Moller to get a sense of how the funding might change the conversation around gun laws in St. Paul. At the time, in September 2022, Minnesota didn’t have an extreme risk protection order, or red flag, law — one of the intended uses of the funding. I wanted to know if Moller thought the cash would increase the chances that the Legislature would pass one of its own, after her attempts to do just that had failed repeatedly.
She said something that turned out to be prescient: “It’s all going to depend on our election.”
Two months later, in November 2022, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party — as the Democratic Party is known in the state — clinched a sweeping victory, winning trifecta control of the state House, Senate, and Governor’s Office for the first time in a decade.
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