Beto O’Rourke’s Presidential Campaign Suddenly Has A Purpose
Article written by Molly Hensley-Clancy in "Buzzfeed":
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA — It was a question that Democrats had faced for years. As Beto O’Rourke traveled around the country calling for gun control, a reporter asked, how would he reassure lawful gun owners who were afraid that the government would take their assault rifles away?
“So, I want to be really clear that that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” O’Rourke said, speaking to journalists under the late August sun in a city that had been torn apart two years earlier by white supremacist violence. “Americans who own AR-15s and AK-47s will have to sell them to the government.”
In the wake of a mass shooting targeting Hispanic immigrants and Mexicans in El Paso, the city he once represented in Congress, something has changed about Beto O’Rourke the presidential candidate.
In recent weeks, he has broken through the Democratic primary’s noise with expressions of raw, visceral, and expletive-laden anger over issues like gun violence and racism. And he has taken a stance that no other major Democratic presidential candidate has touched: calling for mandatory assault weapon buybacks.
After months of campaigning without a clear, cohesive narrative or signature issues for voters to latch onto, with sometimes wobbly answers on why he is different from the 20-some other Democrats running for president, O’Rourke has a message and an explanation for why he is the person to deliver it: what’s happening now in America is f***ed up, and he has seen up close both how much that hurts and how to fix it.
In two days in Virginia this past week, O’Rourke could sometimes look like the same candidate who has struggled to win over Democratic voters. He has spent months snaking across the country speaking mostly about unity and bipartisanship, not President Donald Trump, and tacking solidly towards the middle of the Democratic field on most policies.
He also showed flashes of something different.
In a tightly choreographed trip through Virginia, O’Rourke embraced the bogeyman of the Democrat seeking to take Americans’ guns away, saying he was willing to take a politically unpopular stance he believed was the right thing. At an event the same evening, his voice rose as he spoke about the country’s “f***ed up” acceptance of mass shootings, a speech that ricocheted across the internet.
Alyssa Short, a stay-at-home mom who wore a bright red T-shirt for Moms Demand Action, a gun control group, thought O’Rourke’s call for assault weapons buybacks was a “fantastic idea — I think it’s necessary.”
But politically, she acknowledged, it would be “very risky.”
“I don’t think it’s something he should do his first year in office,” Short said. “It’s something he should work towards. And in order to do that, he’s going to need to build a lot of trust with gun owners, and there’s so many gun owners out there who want common sense gun laws.”
Polling shows that mandatory assault weapon buybacks are among the least popular gun control measures — the only one, in a recent poll, that wasn’t supported by a majority of Americans, though Democrats favor it by wide margins.
O’Rourke tried to find something of a middle ground on assault weapons at the start of his campaign, saying only that they should not be sold. “If you own an AR-15, keep it. Continue to use it safely and responsibly,” he said in Iowa in March. “I just don't think that we need to sell any more weapons of war into this public.”
It is not yet clear what kind of impact his new assault weapons stance could have for O’Rourke in Texas, a state with high levels of gun ownership. On the primary trail, O’Rourke pitches himself as the only Democrat who could win the state in the general election.
