Republican congressman dares Biden and O'Rourke to take rifle from his office
A Colorado Republican has posted a video of an AR-15 rifle on the wall of his Washington DC office and dared the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his putative gun rights czar Beto O’Rourke to “come and take it”.
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But reporters, and the internet in general, were quick to point out the weapon would not only usually be illegal under DC law – it also wasn’t loaded.
What, one Twitter user asked, was congressman Ken Buck going to do if Biden or O’Rourke did show up looking to take his gun?
“Chase Beto around [and] try to poke his eye?”
Biden has emerged as the favorite for the Democratic nomination to face Donald Trump at the polls in November. O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman, is one of a number of moderates who initially ran against the former vice-president but have now come out to back him.
Last August, O’Rourke’s home town, El Paso, was the scene of a mass shooting at a Walmart in which a gunman who expressed pro-Trump views killed 22 people. In the aftermath, O’Rourke was an emotional champion of federal gun control reform.
Famously – or infamously, to those in favor of gun ownership under the second amendment to the US constitution – at a Democratic debate O’Rourke underlined his support for federally mandated buybacks of assault weapons and said: “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”
On the right, it made him a figure of fun and fear which only intensified when Biden told a rally in Dallas this week O’Rourke was “going to take care of the gun problem with me. You’re going to be the one who leads this effort.”
Buck’s video response was blunt.
“I have a message for Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke,” he said. “If you want to take everyone’s AR-15 in America, why don’t you swing by my office in Washington DC and start with this one.”
He then took the firearm – brightly painted with a stars and stripes motif – off his office wall and posed, finger on the trigger.
“Come and take it.”
O’Rourke tweeted a statement in response, saying Buck “makes the case for both an assault weapons ban and a mandatory buyback programme better than I ever could”.
It seems that if Biden ever did detail O’Rourke to go to Buck’s office and attempt such a seizure from the 61-year-old Republican, the 47-year-old, 6ft 4in fitness freak might have a fighting chance.
But it would not be because O’Rourke would have the law behind him. In fact, Buck does.
As the congressman told the Washington Post in 2015, the AR-15 is on his wall because he dutifully submitted to local, federal and political gun regulations.
“I went to the ethics committee,” Buck said, “I got permission to accept the gift. I went to Capitol Hill police; I got permission to bring it into my office. They went to the DC police; they got permission for me to transport it into the District [of Columbia]. I went to [the Transportation Security Administration], and followed all of the regulations in getting it on to the plane and getting it here.”
Buck explained what that meant – and why he might struggle to fight O’Rourke off.
As well as being unloaded and carrying a trigger lock, Buck’s rifle lacks its bolt carrier assembly, without which it cannot be fired and which was removed before it came to Washington.
“Putting a trigger lock on an inoperable gun is like putting a chastity belt on a eunuch,” Buck said, evocatively, before eerily foreshadowing the advice he was to receive on a Friday five years later.
“The only dangerous thing about that gun is if someone took it off the wall and hit somebody else over the head with it.”
