Beto O’Rourke failed in his effort to snag a seat in the Senate. He managed to do so despite the outpouring of support he received from Democrats throughout the nation.

That support likely spurred him on to run for President of the United States, though. After all, with that kind of support, you’ve got to have a viable shot at the White House, right?

Only, it seems those Democrats only liked him because they thought they could remove Ted Cruz from the Senate and start shifting Texas blue. Once he’s on stage with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, their interest waned. Now he’s desperate to fight for any shot in hell of even landing a VP slot. So how does he decide to do it?

By becoming a caricature of the gun-grabbing Democrat.

2020 presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, ramped up his rhetoric on gun control at the New Hampshire Democratic Party convention on Saturday, when he called for a mandatory gun buyback program, a national firearms registry and red flag laws, all in the same speech.

The former congressman and failed Senate candidate promised to stop the sale of “weapons of war” and said every American will have to obtain a federal license if they want to own a firearm.

“This is a country that has produced the leadership that will ensure that we not only have universal background checks and red flag laws and end the sale of those weapons of war, but that we go the necessary steps further as politically difficult as they may be,” he told the crowd.

Of course, we already knew that O’Rourke backed the mandatory buyback program and red flag laws, but the gun registry is new for him. Sen. Cory Booker has backed that particular proposal for a little while now, but now O’Rourke is on that bandwagon as well.

If you look at his entire proposal, it’s the very thing gun rights activists have been saying Democrats wanted for years now, only to have Democrats shake their head and say, “No. No one wants that. We’re just talking about a few common-sense gun control measures. Nothing like that.”

Only, that was a lie.

Granted, we all knew it was a lie. We knew exactly what the endgame was the whole time, but there are people who fill the political middle who actually believed them. They thought those Democrats were being honest. To be fair, some of those Democrats actually believe it themselves, but not all.

We know this because absolutely not one of the Democrats on the national stage are decrying this. None are calling O’Rourke and Booker down for being complete and total idiots.

To be clear, there are pro-gun Democrats. I’ve written about them more than once. They exist.

They’re just not running for president, apparently.

O’Rourke is struggling for relevancy, so what is he doing? He’s going as far left on the gun debate–a major point for the Democrats in this coming election cycle–as he can, hoping he’ll catch fire. The fact that he represented El Paso in Congress only seems to have encouraged him that much more.

The problem for him is that it’s not working. He’s been trending downward since about mid-August despite, or even because of, this anti-gun rhetoric. It seems even Democrats are uncomfortable with this degree of blatant hoplophobia.