O’Rourke’s gun confiscation idea sparks feuds with Trump, Schumer

WASHINGTON — Beto O’Rourke has picked a feud with Sen. Chuck Schumer, after the Senate’s top Democrat rejected his call to confiscate assault-style weapons as a nonstarter even within a party eager to curb gun violence.

“Ask Chuck Schumer what he’s been able to get done,” the former El Paso congressman said Thursday night while stumping in Aurora, Colo., where a gunman killed a dozen people at a movie theater in July 2012.

Taking on one of the most powerful figures in his own party has definite upside for the former El Paso congressman, whose presidential bid has languished for months.

Having staked his campaign on a controversial push for mandatory gun buybacks, he’s now fighting a two-front war, tangling simultaneously with the NRA-friendly president and a leader of his own party.

That positions him as an outsider.

It emphasizes the bold stance he took in last week’s debate in Houston, when his “hell, yes” declaration that he would confiscate AR-15s and AK-47s handed the NRA and other Second Amendment defenders the chance to say they’d been right all along in calling Democrats gungrabbers.

And it gives him a new way to drum up donations.

In an email blast titled “Sen. Schumer is wrong,” the Texan’s campaign cites a recent Monmouth University poll that found 70% support among Democratic voters for mandatory buybacks for assault weapons.

“Look,” the email says, “Beto would support this even if it weren’t popular, because this is about doing the right thing to end our nation’s gun violence epidemic. But the fact is that the vast majority of Democrats do support Beto’s plan — which means it’s time for leadership that embraces bold gun safety reform.”

But many gun control advocates see O’Rourke’s vow as inflammatory, complaining that a push for confiscation could torpedo a consensus they hope is building for universal background checks and measures such as “red flag” laws, which let police take guns from people deemed dangerous by a court.

A rash of mass shootings this summer, including rampages in El Paso and Odessa-Midland that left 29 people dead in August, have ramped up public pressure on Washington to take action.

Schumer has sought to capitalize on the new climate by pushing President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to accept background checks on all gun sales.

On Wednesday, he insisted that O’Rourke’s call for gun seizures lacks support within the party — which isn’t quite true. Two other presidential contenders, Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, also support mandatory buybacks, though not with such charged language as the Texan’s.

“I don’t know of any other Democrat who agrees with Beto O’Rourke, but it’s no excuse not to go forward,” Schumer said on a call with upstate New York reporters.

Schumer met with O’Rourke in February, reportedly to lobby him to run for the Senate again in 2020 after his near-miss against Sen. Ted Cruz last year. O’Rourke jumped into the presidential race a month later.

As a House member in 1994, Schumer led the successful push to ban 19 military-style assault weapons, though the ban expired after a decade. In 1993, he was a key player on the Brady bill, which required background checks for handgun buyers; it also required a five-day waiting period before delivery, which went away in 1998 when a federal criminal database became available for instant checks.