Article from Reason by Eric Boehm.

Of all the places to argue that only the government should be trusted with guns, Beto O’Rourke picked…Kent State University.

Kent State is, of course, the location of the infamous 1970 shooting that left four students dead and nine others injured. The shots were fired not by private citizens but by members of the Ohio National Guard, who shot at a crowd protesting America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Invoking armed agents of the state gunning down unarmed civilians is an interesting way to argue that Americans would be better off if the government forcefully disarmed private citizens. But hey, I guess that’s why we keep being told Beto’s an “unconventional” candidate.

Yesterday, people brought assault weapons to our rally at Kent State—where 4 students were shot dead in 1970.

I told them nobody should show up with an AK-47 or an AR-15 to seek to intimidate us in our own democracy.

We need to buy back every single one of them. pic.twitter.com/U7N5fWUlvv

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 26, 2019

Since the mass shooting at a Walmart in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, former congressman O’Rourke has tried to jump-start his flailing presidential campaign by being the candidate who is most gung-ho about gun control. He made headlines at the most recent Democratic debate by promising, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15.” More specifically, he is proposing a ban on “the manufacturing, sale, and possession of military-style assault weapons”—that is, semiautomatic rifles with certain cosmetic characteristics.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Cory Doctorow (Flickr) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons