As recently as a month ago, Grant Hauschild was still on the fence about whether he would support his DFL colleagues and vote to ban assault weapons.
“I have a responsibility and commitment to my constituents who cherish their guns,” the Northern Minnesota lawmaker said on the Senate floor. “I grew up around guns. I got them as birthday presents. I spent every week going trap shooting.”
But in a tear-filled address Monday, Hauschild said he would be a ‘yes’ vote on a wide-ranging gun control and school violence prevention package that passed the Senate 34-33 on a strict party line vote.
Ultimately, Hauschild said, it was his conversations with people affected by the fatal shooting at Annunciation School and Church last August that swayed his decision.
“It shouldn’t take a personal experience for me to have the courage to do something. But that’s the reality I’m living with.”
Though he gave no floor speech of his own, Sen. Ron Kupec, DFL-Moorhead, also voted ‘yes’ after months of equivocating. So did Judy Seeberger, DFL-Afton, the other member of the party’s troika that once held out on gun control bills.
“I will be a ‘yes’ on this bill because we need to do something, but I am disappointed that this has become a partisan issue used by both sides to advance their aims in an election year,” Seeberger said.
To Seeberger’s point, the Senate’s vote will probably just inform political campaigns, not your ability in the near future to buy an assault weapon or a gun magazine that will let you fire 17 bullets or more before reloading.
Related: After Annunciation shooting, will Minnesota go the way of Texas or Connecticut?
A House split between DFLers and Republicans will almost certainly not compromise on even small gun measures included in this bill, like raising awareness about the state’s red flag gun law, much less an assault weapons ban.
But DFLers say that Minnesotans support these steps, and that suburban lawmakers like Sen. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, and Zach Duckworth, R-Lakeville, could lose reelection for their ‘no’ votes.
Suburban Republicans were largely silent on the Senate floor Monday as their rural counterparts spoke out against DFLers.
Glenn Gruenhagen, R-Glencoe, said “psychotropic drugs” like Prozac prescribed to children cause school shootings. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, instructed bill sponsor Zaynab Mohamed on the finer points of gun parts.
“I take it you don’t know a lot about guns,” Drazkowski said to the Minneapolis lawmaker.
The larger Republican criticism was that the gun provisions are lumped into a bill with policies the GOP supports. These include “encouraging” school districts to create anonymous threat reporting systems, school safety grants, and hiring mental health counselors.
“We have packaged school safety funding with a gun grabbing bill,” said Michael Holmstrom, R-Buffalo.
An amendment by Andrew Mathews, R-Princeton, to sever the gun measures from the non-gun measures failed on a party-line vote.
In a press conference after the vote, Mohamed said that the DFL has not foreclosed the possibility of a non-gun, school safety package.
“We have to talk to our caucus and see where our members are at,” said Mohamed, whose district includes Annunciation, and who emphasized that she has been working with Annunciation parents throughout the legislative process.
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