Presidential hopefuls Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg tussled over the Texas Democrat’s plan to confiscate military-style weapons during Tuesday night’s debate.
O’Rourke shifted the focus of his campaign to emphasize gun control and gun violence following the August shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. His call for a gun confiscation plan received condemnation from both sides of the political aisle.
During the debate, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked O’Rourke how he planned to obtain weapons from gun owners who refuse to give them up.
“If someone does not turn in an AR-15 or an AK-47, one of these weapons of war, or brings it out in public and brandishes it in an attempt to intimidate as we saw — we were at Kent State recently — then that weapon will be taken from them,” O’Rourke stated. “If they persist, there will be other consequences from law enforcement. But the expectation is that Americans will follow the law. I believe in this country, I believe in my fellow Americans. I believe that they will do the right thing.”
Cooper then asked Buttigieg his thoughts because he has labeled O’Rourke’s plan as “confiscation.”
He responded, “Congressman, you just made it clear that you don’t know how this is actually going to take weapons off the streets. If you can develop the plan further, I think we can have a debate about it. But we can’t wait. People are dying in the streets right now.”
“We cannot wait for purity tests. We have to just get something done,” the South Bend, Indiana, mayor added.
The former Texas congressman countered, “This is not a purity test. This is a country that loses 40,000 of our fellow Americans every year to gun violence. This is a crisis. And we’ve got to do something about it. And those challenges that you described are not mutually exclusive to the challenges that I’m describing.”
Buttigieg responded, “The problem isn’t the polls; the problems is the policy. And I don’t need lessons from you on courage, political or personal.”
