Sometimes you’ve got to call a motherfucker out for being a motherfucker. And Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke did just that at a town hall meeting Wednesday night in Mineral Wells, Texas.
O’Rourke was talking about—among other topics—gun control, and specifically the ease of getting an AR-15, the weapon used to murder 19 students and two teachers at an elementary in Uvalde, Texas.
In May, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos legally purchased his rifle, “originally designed for use on the battlefields in Vietnam to penetrate an enemy soldier’s helmet at 500 feet and knock him down dead. Up against kids at 5 feet—” O’Rourke said when a Gov. Greg Abbott supporter interrupted with laughter. O’Rourke then stopped and pointed at the same heckler laughing audibly in the crowd.
“It may be funny to you, motherfucker,” O’Rourke snapped, “but it’s not funny to me.”
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O’Rouke earned a round of applause.
Following the town hall, O’Rourke tweeted:
“Nothing more serious to me than getting justice for the families in Uvalde and stopping this from ever happening again.”
O’Rourke is facing off against the incumbent Abbott in November, and gun control has been the meat of his campaign plan to defeat the governor.
During an Abbott news conference in Uvalde after the mass shooting, O’Rourke confronted Abbott.
“The time to stop the next shooting is right now, and you are doing nothing,” O’Rourke said. “You’re offering us nothing.”
Outside of the press conference, just moments later, O’Rourke told reporters, “It is insane that we allow an 18-year-old to go in and buy an AR-15. What the hell did we think he was gonna do with that? … Right there, if you want a solution, stop selling AR-15s in the state of Texas.”
Wednesday night, O’Rourke listed several solutions he would implement if elected, suggesting “commonsense” gun laws, raising the minimum age to purchase an AR-style rifle, putting universal background checks in place in Texas, and launching red-flag gun laws, The Washington Post reports.
Abbott is polling a slight 6 points over O’Rourke, The Texas Tribune reports.
O’Rourke ended the gun control part of his stump speech with:
“You either accept that we are inherently evil and violent and deadly and love to kill each other and slaughter kids where they sit, or that there is something that you and I can do together regardless of the differences between us.”
Meanwhile, Abbott’s answer to mass shootings is more guns.
The governor announced Wednesday that the Texas Department of Public Safety “will be providing more than 30 law enforcement officers to campuses throughout the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD) for the new school year.”
Watch O’Rourke’s entire speech here: