Politics

‘My AR Is Ready For You Robert Francis’: Texas Rep Tweets At Beto After Debate, Twitter Explodes

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

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A Texas state representative tweeted “My AR is ready for you Robert Francis” at Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Beto O’Rourke during Thursday night’s Democratic debates.

Texas Republican State Rep. Briscoe Cain was responding to O’Rourke’s contention that government will “take your AR-15” if he wins office and his gun control plan is implemented. The tweet has reportedly been deleted by Twitter.

“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, so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield, not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers,” the former Texas Rep. said during Thursday night’s debate. “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 and Midland. 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 gonna allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore.”

Responding to Briscoe’s tweet later that night, O’Rourke called it a “death threat” and contended that the Texas state representative “shouldn’t own an AR-15.”

To which Cain quickly responded:

The Democratic presidential candidate later called Cain’s tweet an “irresponsible thing for him to do.”

“I think it’s a really irresponsible thing for him to do, especially somebody who is a public servant and in a position of public trust to be sending that kind of message to this country, we are a nation of laws, and if that ends up becoming the law of the United States of America, then we expect the people of this country to comply with it,” O’Rourke told CBS News. (RELATED: Beto’s Latest Gun Buyback Idea: You Will Voluntarily Comply)

The exchange went viral on Twitter, with prominent gun control advocates weighing in and calling it a real death threat:

O’Rourke confirmed that his campaign indeed called the FBI.

However, not everyone agreed with the argument that Briscoe’s tweet was an actual death threat.

Cain clarified his comment via a response to someone to wrote he was “basically just saying ‘come and take it.'”

Finally: