Former Vice President Joe Biden Joe BidenFormer Pence aide: White House staffers discussed Trump refusing to leave office Progressive group buys domain name of Trump's No. 1 Supreme Court pick Bloomberg rolls out M ad buy to boost Biden in Florida MORE raised eyebrows Friday when he asked attendees at a town hall in New Hampshire to imagine if former President Obama had been assassinated.

The remark at the event, which was billed as focused on health care, came while Biden was talking about his political heroes, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., who died in 1968.

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"My senior semester, they were both shot and killed," Biden said, according to multiple reports. "Imagine what would have happened if, God forbid, if Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaDemocrats ramp up pressure on Lieberman to drop out of Georgia Senate race The Hill's Campaign Report: Biden on Trump: 'He'll leave' l GOP laywers brush off Trump's election remarks l Obama's endorsements Trump pledges to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, designate KKK a terrorist group in pitch to Black voters MORE had been assassinated after becoming the de facto nominee. What would've happened in America?"

The question was intended to spark a conversation comparing today's political climate to that of the late 1960s. Biden told the crowd the dual assassinations of Kennedy and King helped spark his own political awareness as a young man.

The jarring question was raised on a day when the campaign would rather have focused on touting the 11th anniversary of Obama’s announcement of Biden as his running mate in the 2008 race.

Biden has been under increased scrutiny from the press in recent weeks amid a series of gaffes, including misstating the decade in which King and Kennedy were killed and saying that poor kids” are “just as talented as white kids,” before correcting himself and saying “wealthy kids.”

Biden is the front-runner in the crowded Democratic presidential primary. He has often worked on the campaign trail to highlight his political and personal relationship with Obama, who remains widely popular within the party.

Updated: 10:50 p.m.