Politicians seeking to confiscate guns from Americans shouldn't share their plans with the public beforehand and should seek to maintain an element of surprise, Joy Behar said on "The View" Monday.

Behar was discussing former 2020 presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke, a Democrat from Texas, and said it was foolish of him to announce his plans for gun confiscation before he was elected. She advised all politicians to go after the country's guns after they've assumed office.

"They should not tell everything they’re going to do. If you're going to take people’s guns away, wait until you get elected -- then take the guns away," she said. "Don’t tell them ahead of time."

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Co-host Meghan McCain also weighed in on the issue and said O'Rourke has poisoned the well and scared off independent voters from the Democratic party.

"I will also say that his stance on gun buybacks -- Mayor Pete said it was a shiny object that distracts from achievable gun reform," she said earlier in the interview. "That clip will be played for years... with organizations that try and scare people by saying that Democrats are coming for your guns.

"[Beto] also made some statements about religious institutions getting their tax-exempt status removed from them because they didn’t support same-sex marriage," McCain continued. "He did a lot of, like, battleground culture war, and he ran as the most left, most woke candidate and look where he ended."

O'Rourke, a former congressman, dropped out of the 2020 race on Friday, telling supporters, "It is clear to me now that this campaign does not have the means to move forward successfully.

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“My service to the country will not be as a candidate or as the nominee,” O’Rourke wrote in a post on Medium. “Acknowledging this now is in the best interests of those in the campaign; it is in the best interests of this party as we seek to unify around a nominee, and it is in the best interests of the country.”

Fox News' Vandana Rambaran and Alex Pappas contributed to this report