Texas State Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa appeared on Univision’s Sunday political affairs show Al Punto and responded to host Jorge Ramos’ cheerleading over Beto O’Rourke’s proposed gun grab with a cold dose of reality.
Watch below as Hinojosa tells Ramos, in so many words, that Beto’s dog don’t hunt:
JORGE RAMOS, SENIOR ANCHOR, UNIVISION: I believe that the most impressive part was listening to Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who is from El Paso, Texas, saying, “yes, we are taking away your weapons of war, we don’t want them.” Is that something that can be accepted here, Gilberto? For someone to come and say, “I’m taking your machine gun away from you”?
GILBERTO HINOJOSA, CHAIR, TEXAS DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Um. it would be very difficult to do that in the State of Texas because in this state, it is common for people to have many weapons... to have....weapons of war...um...to have many guns, to collect guns...and Texans have a history of protecting their right to bear arms, and that would be very difficult.
RAMOS: So, mandatory confiscation.
This most recent edition of Al Punto was a wrap-up of the Democratic presidential debate held in Houston, Texas- and featured several panel discussions. The first of these, as shown above, was comprised of Hinojosa, former Treasurer of the United States Rosario Marín, and retired U.S. Representative Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL).
It should come as a surprise to no one that Ramos, given his lengthy history of anti-Second Amendment biases (which once included a call for the repeal of the Second Amendment), claimed to be most impressed by O’Rourke’s confiscatory “hell yeah”. In fact, one can almost imagine the eruption of a Matthewsesque leg thrill upon hearing Beto’s proposal to impose confiscatory “mandatory buybacks.”
Hinojosa then proceeds to pop that bubble by affirming that a “mandatory buyback” as proposed by O’Rourke would be an extremely heavy lift in the State of Texas, given the Lone Star State's unique history. Ramos is thus triggered into redirecting the segment over to Marín and Gutiérrez (who showed themselves to be more amenable to confiscatory legislation) with that jarring “SO, MANDATORY BUYBACKS.”
Even though he went along with Ramos’ “weapons of war” language, Hinojosa’s gentle yet brutal reality check inadvertently explained why defenders of the Second Amendment rarely see air on Univision. Too bad for Univision’s viewers that it took a Democrat state party chair to bring balance on the issue of guns.
