Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has promised to hire Beto O’Rourke to lead his anti-gun efforts if elected this November.
“I wanna make something clear, I’m going to guarantee you this is not the last you’ve seen of [O’Rourke],” Biden said Monday night during a campaign stop in Texas.
“You’re going to take care of the gun problem with me,” he continued.
“You’re going to be the one who leads this effort.”
“I’m counting on you. I’m counting on you,” Biden said.
“We need you badly; the state needs you, the country needs you. You’re the best.”
Washingtonexaminer.com reports: O’Rourke, a Democrat who lost a 2018 Senate bid to Ted Cruz, dropped out of the presidential race in November.
During a Democratic debate in September, O’Rourke confirmed he supported the confiscation of firearms from people deemed to be a threat to themselves or others.
“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 … Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47, we’re not going to allow it to be used on fellow Americans anymore,” O’Rourke said.
O’Rourke attacked Biden on several occasions during the early days of the Democratic primary last summer.
“You cannot go back to the end of the Obama administration and think that that’s good enough,” he said last June. “As much of a horror show as Trump has been — his racism, the disaster of his foreign policy, his punishment of farmers and workers here in this country — we had real problems before Donald Trump became president.”
The onetime congressman from El Paso joined a pair of other former presidential hopefuls, Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, in endorsing Biden on Monday.
“We need somebody who can bring us together and heal us. We need somebody who can restore the moral authority of the United States,” O’Rourke said Monday. “We need Joe Biden.”
Biden notched a key win in South Carolina on Saturday, closing the gap between himself and front-runner Bernie Sanders.
Voters in 14 states and American Samoa will vote March 3 as part of Super Tuesday contests, in which 1,357 delegates are up for grabs.