“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke said during the third presidential debate in Houston tonight. “We’re not going to allow it to be used against a fellow American anymore.”

O’Rourke is a solidly second-tier candidate in the Democratic primary race: He has consistently won roughly 2 to 3 percent of voters surveyed in national polls. Nevertheless, he may have a distinctive role to play in the coming months. After his hometown of El Paso, Texas, was hit by a deadly mass shooting in a Walmart, the former congressman has pivoted his 2020 campaign to focus primarily on guns. His impassioned arguments for gun control, born from his lived experience of leaving the campaign trail to sit with the victims of gun violence and their families, may set the Democratic conversation around guns, not least because O’Rourke’s competitors seem eager to hand him the mic and listen.