Beto O’Rourke still wants to ‘take’ your guns if elected governor, not too eager to have Biden stump in Texas

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(Video: CNN)

Failed 2018 U.S. Senate and 2020 presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, a Second Amendment “protector” and “anti-extremist” who is now running for governor of Texas, sounds like he still wants to take away your guns, or at least some of them, but you can watch the segment embedded above and draw your own conclusions.

In the Sunday interview on CNN, O’Rourke told host Dana Bash that gun control still appears to be one of the top items on his to-do list.

In the segment, Bash played a clip from a Democrat presidential debate during which O’Rourke alluded to the tragic, August 2019 mass shooting in his El Paso, Texas, hometown in which he emotionally declared that “hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your Ak-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against fellow Americans anymore.”

“Is that what you would still do as governor of Texas?” Bash asked O’Rourke, who wants to unseat GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, during the Sunday conversation.

“Look, we are a state that has a long, proud tradition of responsible gun ownership. And most of us here in Texas do want — do not want to see our friends, our family members, our neighbors shot up with these weapons of war,” O’Rourke asserted.

“So, yes, I still hold this view. But I also have been listening to my Texans, my fellow Texans who are concerned about this idea of permitless carry that Greg Abbott has signed into law, which allows any Texan to carry a loaded firearm, despite the pleadings of police chiefs and law enforcement from across the state, who said it would make their jobs more dangerous and make it harder for them to protect those that they were sworn to serve in their communities,” he claimed.

“So, we don’t want extremism in our gun laws. We want to protect the Second Amendment. We want to protect the lives of our fellow Texans. And I know that when we come together and stop this divisive extremism that we see from Greg Abbott right now, we’re going to be able to do that,” the Democrat added.

Common sense suggests the O’Rourke campaign already ran a focus group on the word extremism for use in the pro-gun Lone Star State and which now seems to be part of his standard lexicon.

In bad news for O’Rourke’s bid, a new poll claims that O’Rourke would even lose if popular A-list actor Matthew McConaughey runs and makes it a three-way race.

When asked to comment on the Kyle Rittenhouse not-guilty verdict, O’Rourke verbalized another presumably focus-grouped term: common-sense gun regulation.

“I mean, this entire tragedy makes the case that we should not allow our fellow Americans to own and use weapons that were originally designed for battlefield use,” he insisted.

“That AR-15, that AK-47 has one, single solitary purpose, and that is killing people as effectively, as efficiently, in as great a number, in as little time as possible. We saw that in Kenosha. We saw that in El Paso, Texas, where 23 people were murdered by someone with an AK-47 just in a matter of minutes,” O’Rourke continued.

“This is crazy. And we should not come to expect this as a matter of course in America. And the thing is, we don’t have to. So, here in Texas, where most of us, including myself, grew up learning how to use firearms responsibly, let’s bring that experience and knowledge to bear. Let’s protect the Second Amendment. Let’s also make sure that we protect one another by having commonsense gun laws. I know that we can do it,” he said.

According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group, O’Rourke’s premise about the AR-15 may have misfired.

The term “modern sporting rifle” was coined to describe today’s very popular semiautomatic rifle designs, including the AR-15 and its offspring. These rifles are used by hunters, competitors, a lot of Americans seeking home-defense guns and by many others who simply enjoy going to the range…

The central reason these firearms are misunderstood is political. Though the semiautomatic design used in today’s pistols, rifles and shotguns was invented in the late-nineteenth century and was popularly sold to consumers in America and Europe in the early twentieth century, the modern sporting rifle has been called a “weapon of war” by those who want to ban them…

AR-15-style rifles are NOT “assault weapons” or “assault rifles.” An assault rifle is fully automatic, a machine gun…If someone calls an AR-15-style rifle an “assault weapon,” then they’ve been duped by an agenda. The only real way to define what is an “assault weapon” is politically, as in how any given law chooses to define the term—this is why the states that have banned this category of semiautomatic firearms have done so with very different definitions…”

 

O’Rourke dodged when Bash asked him if he wanted deeply unpopular President Joe Biden to campaign for him.

“This campaign in Texas is not gonna be about Joe Biden. It’s not gonna be about Donald Trump. It’s not gonna be about anyone from outside our state…There’s no politician, there’s no other person from outside of this state, who can help to change the course of this election for better or for worse,” he declared.

O’Rourke’s focus on local issues is interesting in that the Democrat establishment and its media allies are still obsessed with ex-President Donald Trump, including running against POTUS 45 rather than eventual GOP winner Glenn Youngkin (along with Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears and Attorney General Jason Miyares) in the Virginia governor election.

While on CNN, O’Rourke, who served three terms in the U.S. House, made some roundabout criticism of Biden’s handling or non-handling of the illegal immigration crisis with some verbiage about rewriting immigration laws and listening to people who live in the border region.

He did not mention, however, securing the border itself.

Conservative firebrand and political newcomer Lauren Boebert probably is a Member of Congress because of Beto O’Rourke.

Boebert initially came to national prominence when she confronted then-presidential candidate O’Rourke in September 2019. “I am here to say: Hell, no, you’re not,” she told the Texas Democrat referring back to the aforementioned “hell yes” vow at the presidential debate question on whether, if elected, he’d confiscate guns like the AR-15 away from law-abiding citizens.

Here is some of the social media reaction to the CNN segment:

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