By: Teresa Mull

Beto O’Rourke, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who infamously quipped, “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” has revealed that he plans to force gun manufacturers to fun his gun buyback program.

When asked how much his proposed buyback program would cost taxpayers, O’Rourke said:

I think a mandatory buyback can be financed with a surcharge that would be paid by gun manufacturers, those who are making the AR-15s and AK-47s and continue to sell them into our communities despite the terror that they’ve inspired and the lives that have been taken.

O’Rourke did not provide any more specifics on his plan. As a reminder, here’s what O’Rourke said during one of the latest presidential debates:

“The high-impact, high velocity round, when it hits your body shreds everything inside your body because it was designed to do that, so that you would bleed to death on the battlefield. When we see that being used against children, and in Odessa, I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15 and 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, there weren’t enough ambulances to get to them in time.

“… Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against a fellow American anymore.”

Breitbart reports:

O’Rourke also omitted FBI crime stats for 2018, which show over twice as many people were killed with fists and feet than were killed with rifles of any kind. Those same FBI stats show over five times as many people were killed with knives and cutting instruments than were killed with rifles of any kind.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation calculates there are 16 million-plus privately owned AR-15s in the U.S.

Teresa Mull is editor of Gunpowder Magazine. Contact her at [email protected].