Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke made his support for an assault weapons buyback very clear during Thursday night’s Democratic debate. “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” he said at the time.
Beto O’Rourke says “death threat” from a Republican state representative shows why no one should own assault weapons
“Clearly you shouldn’t own an AR-15, and neither should anyone else.”
Li Zhou is a former politics reporter at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the Atlantic.
It was one of the most memorable moments of the night, and it’s since spurred a tweet from a state lawmaker that O’Rourke called a “death threat.” Following the debate, Briscoe Cain, a Republican in the Texas Legislature, posted a response to O’Rourke’s gun comments, which Twitter has since taken down. “My AR is ready for you Robert Francis,” he wrote.
In his response, O’Rourke pointedly noted that Cain’s statement was indicative of why people shouldn’t have assault weapons. According to the Washington Post, O’Rourke’s campaign has since reported the tweet to the FBI.
Briscoe replied to O’Rourke’s comment by calling him a “child,” and posting other tweets that scoffed at concerns that he was promoting violence. A Twitter spokesperson told Vox the original tweet was taken down because it violated the platform’s terms of service and its rules for “violence and wishing harm against others.”
O’Rourke’s comments on assault weapons were among the debate responses that stood out on Thursday, and they came in the wake of a mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso, Texas. Since the shooting took place in early August, O’Rourke has committed not only to a ban on assault weapons, or military-style guns, but a more expansive proposal: buying them back from people who own them.
During Thursday’s debate, he was pressed on exactly what his support for a buyback meant, and he offered a pretty detailed elaboration:
I am [proposing to take away guns] if it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield. If the high impact, high velocity round, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body, because it was designed to do that, so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers.
When we see that being used against children, and in Odessa, I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15, and that mother watched her bleed to death over the course of an hour because so many other people were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa and Midland, there weren’t enough ambulances to get to them in time, hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore.
And I want to say this. I’m listening to the people of this country. The day after I proposed doing that, I went to a gun show in Conway, Arkansas, to meet with those who were selling AR-15s and AK-47s and those who were buying those weapons. And you might be surprised, there was some common ground there, folks who said, I would willingly give that up, cut it to pieces, I don’t need this weapon to hunt, to defend myself. It is a weapon of war.
So, let’s do the right thing, but let’s bring everyone in America into the conversation, Republicans, Democrats, gun-owners, and non-gun owners alike.
As Vox’s German Lopez has reported, a buyback plan, which has already been implemented in Australia, could help reduce the number of guns that are available in the US and curb gun violence as a result.
Much like it sounds, it would effectively involve the US government requiring assault weapon owners to turn in their guns, in exchange for some kind of payment. The idea has picked up more support from 2020 Democrats in the past few months, though it continues to encounter strong opposition from Republicans, who’ve suggested that it could be unconstitutional.
O’Rourke, who has been one of the most vocal lawmakers advocating in favor of a buyback program, commented further on Briscoe’s post during a CNN appearance on Friday. “Twitter took it down because you have somebody with a weapon of war threaten to use it against somebody who’s talking about gun violence in this country,” he said. “That’s exactly why Briscoe Cain should not have an AR-15.”
