Meghan McCain Is Almost Giving ‘Permission To Be Violent,’ Says Beto O’Rourke
Presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke is holding back no punches when it comes to his new push for gun control. Accordingly, the Texan — who recently had two mass shootings in his home state — had fighting words for The View co-host Meghan McCain. According to The Daily Beast, O’Rourke slammed the blond pundit for her views on buy-back policies, claiming that her words are almost giving people “permission to be violent.”
Earlier this week, conservative mainstay McCain had predicted that violence would follow any requirement for owners of AR-15 to relinquish their weapons. O’Rourke took issue with both both the claim and language used by McCain.
“I just I think that kind of language and rhetoric is not helpful,” the former congressman said to The Daily Beast.
“It becomes self-fulfilling; you have people on TV who are almost giving you permission to be violent and saying, ‘You know this is this is going to happen.'”
O’Rourke then expanded on his previous statement.
“When someone says, “If you do this, then this will happen,” O’Rourke said, “almost as though that’s a natural response or maybe even something that should happen or deserves to happen. When I think the response should be, ‘We’re doing nothing now and we’re seeing people slaughtered in their schools, at work, at a Walmart, in a synagogue, in a church, at a concert.'”
“There is violence right now and it is horrifying,” the presidential hopeful added. He made the comments to the news website shortly before attending a CNN town hall on environmental activism.
O’Rourke claimed that though he acknowledged that many would not be happy with a mandatory buy-back system, he believed that, at the end of the day, a vast majority of Americans would follow the law and surrender their weapons.
McCain replied to the former congressman’s remarks on Twitter this past afternoon.
Beto is the only man in all of Texas who would revise ‘Come and Take It’ to ‘Please, Come and Take It.’ #borntorun https://t.co/YE6bbUuWqJ
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) September 5, 2019
Since the shooting in El Paso, in which 22 people were killed in a Walmart, O’Rourke has shifted the focus of his campaign onto gun control. It is a popular cause for many Americans, and 61 percent of the public support something to be done about gun violence in the country, per NPR.
In addition to the El Paso shootings, a man recently killed seven people in West Texas after being pulled over while driving.
Though O’Rourke is likely passionate about the subject, it is also possible that he hopes it will revive his flailing campaign. Thanks to an intensely crowded Democratic field vying for the presidential nomination, the Texas native hovers just over 2 percent and lags behind newcomers Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg.
