At a town hall event for Robert “Beto” O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, O’Rourke was confronted over his gun confiscation comments in which he said “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15.”
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“I am here to say: Hell, no, you’re not,” a woman said in an exchange with O’Rourke during the campaign event in Aurora, Colo. on Thursday. The exchange was captured in a video, shared by the Daily Wire reporter Ryan Saavedra and Fox News identified the woman as Lauren Bobert.
A woman confronts Beto O’Rourke over his claims that he is going to confiscate people’s guns
She tells him “Hell no!”
O’Rourke’s supporters were so rude to the woman that O’Rourke repeatedly has to tell them to knock it off pic.twitter.com/LD9ORGJHHT
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 20, 2019
Boebert’s remarks called into question O’Rourke’s comments from last week’s Democratic presidential debate, wherein he voiced support for a mandatory gun buyback program for any weapon “that was designed to kill people on a battlefield.”
In the video, audience members could be heard trying to shout over Boebert. At several points, O’Rourke called on the crowd to “be respectful” and let Boebert speak.
“I would like to know how you intend to legislate people,” Boebert went on. “Because it is not the gun, it is the heart of the man that does that.”
Boebert, who said she lived in Aurora around the time of the 1999 shooting at the nearby Columbine High School, described the victims of the shooting as having had no means to defend themselves.
“I have four children, I am 5-foot-0, 100 pounds, I cannot really defend myself with a fist,” Boebert said. “…I want to know how you’re going to legislate that because a criminal, by defense, breaks the law. So all you’re going to do is restrict law-abiding citizens like myself.”
“There are 329 million of us. There are 390 million guns. No other country has this kind of ratio. No other country allows its citizens to buy weapons that were designed for war,” O’Rourke responded, according to Fox News. “The logic of your argument is, why shouldn’t we allow you to have a bazooka or drive a tank down the street?”
Evan Todd, a survivor of the Columbine shooting also raised a question to O’Rourke on whether he would consider banning all semi-automatic firing weapons, a category of firearm that includes most handguns, in addition to the guns patterned after the AR-15 and AK-47, as O’Rourke suggested during his debate comments.
“I understand that you want to implement a mandatory buyback for ARs and AK-47s. None of my classmates were murdered with those weapons,” Todd said. “Fifty percent of mass murders with those weapons. Don’t you think it’s time we get rid of all semi-auto firearms?”
O’Rourke thanked Todd for his question but said his current criteria on ARs and AK-47s was one that “makes sense to me.”
“If that weapon was designed to kill people and does so effectively, efficiently, then we should no longer be selling them to one another,” O’Rourke answered.
Saavedra suggested Todd’s question was a test of O’Rourke’s proposals and his understanding of what he was proposing to legislate.
This is not what happened
Evan Todd is very pro-Second Amendment and he was testing to see where Beto O’Rourke’s limits are on his extreme gun control policies https://t.co/ANUhQl0iWJ
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 20, 2019
Todd affirmed Saavedra’s assessment in a Friday tweet. He appeared to echo Boebert’s “hell no,” response to O’Rourke’s gun control proposals.
I wanted a clear answer from Beto of where he draws the line, but never got one. To answer my own question on if we should ban guns, the answer is: HELL NO! As far as my stance on guns? The Second Amendment supports me. https://t.co/2W0fPzn0aD
— Evan (@evanmtodd) September 20, 2019
Todd has previously spoken in support of armed school staff as a deterrent to school shootings, like the one he survived.
