Beto draws applause on gun buyback plan

Beto O’Rourke finally got his time in the presidential race spotlight.

It’s been a difficult run for O’Rourke, who’s struggled to get beyond a few percentage points in the polls and has been dogged by calls to drop out and return to Texas to run for Senate.

But on Thursday, if only for one night, it all clicked, as much of the debate circled around just the things O’Rourke has rebuilt his campaign around after the deadly shooting in his hometown ofEl Paso — President Donald Trump, racism and gun violence — and it all kept coming back to him.

From the debate stage in Houston on Thursday night, O’Rourke’s competitors heaped praise on his response to the deadly shooting, in which 22 people were killed by a man who drove across the state after posting an anti-immigrant manifesto decrying a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

The debate moderators teed him up repeatedly to deliver to a national audience the refocused campaign message he’s taken on the road since the shooting — that Trump is a white supremacist encouraging racist violence. And he drew perhaps the biggest applause of the night when he was asked whether he really wants to take away people’s guns — and he didn’t hold back.

“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke said.

O’Rourke led several Democrats on the stage in calling Trump a racist and a danger to people of color in America. He focused his opening statement on the shooting and Trump, saying “a racism and violence that had long been part of America was welcomed out in the open and directed at my hometown.”

“We have a white supremacist in the White House, and he poses a mortal threat to people of color all across this country,” O’Rourke said later in the evening.

He called out racial disparities in school discipline and maternal mortality rates. He said the true founding of the nation was in 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to America — not with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

“Racism in America is endemic, it is foundational,” O’Rourke said.

But the defining moment of the night came when he said he was serious about his plan to take away people’s guns, specifically with a mandatory buyback program for assault-style weapons, citing a second shooting in West Texas last month.

“I am, if it is a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield,” he said to the first of several roars of applause. “If the high-impact, high-velocity round, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up, and not kill one of our soldiers.”

In an impassioned speech, he said those weapons shouldn’t be used against children, like a15-year-old girl in Odessa who was shot last month by a gunman firing at random using an AR-15.

“That mother watched her bleed to death over the course of an hour because so many other people were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa and Midland there weren’t enough ambulances to get to them in time. Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

One by one, his competitors showered him with praise.

“Beto, God love you for standing so courageously in the midst of that tragedy,” Sen. Kamala Harris said.

“The way Beto handled … what happened in his hometown is meaningful,” former Vice President Joe Biden said.

“I want to commend Beto,” former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro said. “He’s done a great job with that.”

Staff writer Andrea Zelinski contributed to this report. ben.wermund@chron.com