Maggie AstorCompte certifié

"Those who are worried about the polls and want to triangulate or talk to the consultants or listen to the focus groups... mandatory buybacks are supported by a majority of Americans," he said. Midway through, he dropped the vagueness and said he was talking to Buttigieg.

"Mayor Pete probably wants to get to the right place but is afraid of doing the right thing right now," Beto says. (Buttigieg supports a voluntary buyback program.)

Beto says "AR-15 owners have approached me in airports, in public restrooms — true story, in Katy, Texas," and told him they would be willing to give up their AR-15s.

Beto has spoken twice now of an El Paso shooting victim who was shot once in the Walmart attack, and the bullet damaged both kidneys, his spleen, his gallbladder, his liver, and his intestine in three places, and he's undergone 21 surgeries.

.@Emma4Change asked Beto how he would go about appointing a director of gun violence prevention, one of the items in March for Our Lives's platform, which Beto has endorsed. "I'm really going to rely on you... to make sure that we have the best advice and counsel," he says.

Beto's done; @amyklobuchar up next. While we wait for her, one piece of context on Beto's criticism of Buttigieg for not supporting a mandatory assault weapons buyback is that Beto himself didn't support a mandatory buyback in his Senate campaign last year. He said at the time:

"If you purchased that AR-15, if you own it, keep it. Continue to use it responsibly... If you own a gun, keep that gun. Nobody wants to take it away from you — at least I don’t want to do that.” He has significantly broadened his proposals during his presidential campaign.

"As your president, I won't fold," she says.

Like many activists, and several other candidates, Klobuchar emphasizes, "We just can't isolate it to the mass shootings. We have to remember that everyday violence." Says this is why universal background checks and more CDC funding are so important.

Klobuchar gets an audience question about how to keep guns away from racists and other extremists. "The question you just asked me, I asked the FBI director," she says, adding that the government has to "see this as the domestic terrorism that it is."

Among other things, she says she would appoint an attorney general "that's going to make this a major priority"; appoint a director of gun violence prevention to coordinate among agencies, as MFOL has proposed; and give more resources to local officials.

Klobuchar says she asks herself about all restrictions, "Does this hurt my Uncle Dick and his deer stand? And these ideas we've talked about today... they don't hurt him and his deer stand, they don't hurt other hunters and their deer stands."

Asked about a cap on gun purchases (e.g., you can only buy one gun per month), she says she'd be open to considering it but would rather focus on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and universal background checks.

Melvin asks if Klobuchar's buyback program would be mandatory or voluntary; she says voluntary.

We now have a short break before @AndrewYang comes on.

"Did I see Alyssa Milano in here?" Craig Melvin says, chatting with the audience before Yang comes on. "You're everywhere."

And we're back with @AndrewYang.

"No, he did not bring $1,000 for every family," Melvin says. "You don't know that, Craig," Yang says.

Melvin asks about Yang's tiered gun licensing system. Yang says he sees it as analogous to driver's licenses — you need one license to drive a passenger car, but if you want to drive a truck, you need a commercial license.

All guns should require a license, he says, but different guns have "different levels of destructive capacity," and if a particular gun "requires a little bit more sophisticated training," then that training should be required in the licensing process.

Talking about providing more resources to schools and other programs to help young people who might become violent, Yang says:

"I believe we need to try and attack the root causes of this as well, because the fact is even if we get commonsense gun laws across the finish line… we’re going to wake up the next morning and we know there is still going to be gun violence in our communities..."

"We’re going to be struggling with this for generations, unfortunately, so we need to attack the root causes in addition to the last links in the chain."

If everyone had an instant self-destruct button, most "probably would have pressed it at one point in our lives," Yang says, & what can happen with gun owners is "they have that one moment" & "make an irreversible & tragic decision that they would have regretted a moment later."

Yang now talking about changing incentives for the gun lobby. Says because many people rush to buy guns after a shooting—bc they want to protect themselves or they're afraid gun control will pass—"if you're a gun manufacturer, you actually profit when there's a mass shooting."

He argues that if gun manufacturers had to pay a fine every time their products were used to kill someone, "the incentives would be reversed very quickly... we have to make it in their financial best interest to make us safer."

An audience member who was bartending at the Route 91 festival when the shooting happened just recalled using her finger to plug a bullet hole in someone's head & holding a man's hand as he died. Says she sat with his body for hours, answered his phone and had to tell his mother.

Yang, who has two young kids, said schools should end active-shooter drills; he believes they're traumatic and not effective. "It gives rise to a real sense of uncertainty for that child. If you can’t be secure in your own classroom...your whole sense of the world gets shaken."

Children shouldn't have to worry about being shot, Yang says. "Let the adults worry about them getting shot, and let the kids go to school."