James Talarico has brought an unusual authority into the gun debate: God.
The Texas state representative for District 50 and Democrat nominee for Senate made the remark during a 2023 Texas House debate.
Talarico said lawmakers who failed to advance a gun restriction were "ignoring God's messengers," referring to people pleading for legislative action after the Uvalde school shooting.
From the Associated Press:
Crockett and Talarico waged a spirited race as Democrats look for their first Senate win in Texas since 1988.
Crockett has built a national profile for zinger attacks on Republicans and focused on turning out Black voters in the Dallas and Houston areas. Talarico, a seminarian who often references the Bible, held rallies across the state, including in heavily Republican areas.
“We are not just trying to win an election,” a jubilant Talarico told supporters in Austin before the race was called. “ We are trying to fundamentally change our politics. And it’s working.”
Dallas voter Tanu Saini said she cast her ballot for Talarico because he “really spoke to me in the way he tries to unify.”
Tomas Sanchez, a voter in Dallas County, said he supported Crockett because “she cares about immigrants, she cares about the American people in a way that a lot of the Republicans have proven they haven’t.”
Talarico was a coauthor of HB 2744, whose primary author was Democratic state Rep. Tracy King. The measure would've prohibited most transfers to people under 21 of semiautomatic rifles capable of accepting detachable magazines and chambered above .22 caliber.
Exceptions covered peace officers, members and honorably discharged veterans of the armed forces, and several sporting or hunting situations.
Calling the proposal an AR-15 restriction is understandable because the rifle falls within the category, although HB 2744 wasn't limited to AR-15s. The bill ultimately never became law.
Talarico's divine-language argument joins a long tradition of politicians speaking with considerably more certainty about firearms than their technical knowledge sometimes warrants.
President Joe Biden supplied one of the more remarkable examples in May 2022, when he described what he said a trauma doctor had told him: "A .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung" while "a 9-millimeter bullet blows the lung out of the body."
From the American Presidency Project:
I know that it makes no sense to be able to purchase something that can fire up to 300 rounds. I know it makes—and I know what happened when we had rational action before, back in—when the—[inaudible]—which was the law that I got passed. It did significantly cut down mass murders. And so there's only one reason for something that can fire, you know, 100 shots.
I mean—and I'll just conclude with this: Look, when I first started doing hearings on the issue of what rational gun laws should be, it was during this period when I was a Senator and the death rate was going up. Not that many more people were being shot, but the death rate was up. And when I think of—I'm not sure, I think it was—[inaudible]—hospital in New York—whatever the largest trauma hospital is.
And I sat with a trauma doc, and I asked him—I said: "What's the difference? Why are so many people"—and not that many more people were being shot. This is now 20 years ago or 25 years. I said, "Why are they dying?" And they showed me a x-ray. He said, "A .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out, may be able to get it, and save the life. A 9- millimeter bullet blows the lung out of the body."
So the idea of these high-caliber weapons is of—there's simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection, hunting. I mean, I just—and remember, the Constitution, the Second Amendment was never absolute. You couldn't buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. You couldn't go out and purchase a lot of weapons.
And those who—not many are saying it anymore, but there was a while there where people were saying that, you know, the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots and what we have to do is, you have to be able to take on the Government when they're wrong. Well, to do that, you need an F-15, you know? Or you need an Abrams tank.
Firearms experts and a trauma surgeon later rejected the literal claim. A 9-mm gunshot can obviously cause damage or be fatal, but a typical 9-mm round doesn't blast a lung from somebody's body.
Biden returned to similar territory in 2023, saying of high-velocity rifle ammunition that "most bullets would go just straight through and out," while one associated with the AR-15 "blows up once it's inside your body."
Rifle rounds produce devastating wounds because of velocity, bullet construction, impact location, fragmentation, and other factors.
The description of a standard AR-15 bullet simply "blowing up," however, was imprecise.
Another basic point frequently mangled in political conversation: the "AR" in AR-15 traces to ArmaLite, not "automatic rifle." A conventional civilian AR-15 is semiautomatic, meaning one round fires each time the trigger is pulled. Federal law treats a weapon that fires more than one shot through a single function of the trigger as a machine gun.
Talarico's older comments on prisons add another layer to his record. During a 2022 speech to incarcerated students receiving high school diplomas, he said prisons allow society to ignore consequences of "systemic racism and global capitalism."
He argued that shifting half of spending on wars, prisons, and policing toward education, healthcare, and jobs could "make prisons obsolete," and he encouraged listeners to imagine a "world without prisons."
From the Washington Free Beacon:
Left-wing Texas Senate candidate James Talarico says he opposes defunding the police and has a "proven track record" of supporting law enforcement. Perhaps that is true now, but in 2022, he called to slash police and prison budgets and redirect the money to social programs, a move he argued would "make prisons obsolete," video footage shows.
Talarico's remarks came during a 2022 speech he delivered to a group of Texas inmates graduating from a high school diploma program. After approvingly quoting the prominent prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore—Talarico described her as an "anti-prison activist" who said "prisons are a catchall solution to our social problems"—he laid out his vision for a "world without prisons."
"Prisons allow us to ignore the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism," Talarico said. "If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete."
"It's hard to imagine a world without prisons," he continued. "But it was also hard to imagine a world without telegrams and cassette tapes. Just because it was hard to imagine doesn't mean you shouldn't. We won't build it overnight, but dreaming is the first step."
Meanwhile, the constitutional fight over AR-15-style rifles is moving somewhere speeches carry less weight than precedent. The Supreme Court agreed June 30 to hear consolidated challenges involving bans on commonly owned semiautomatic rifles. On Sept. 3, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) and more than 60 House Republicans filed an amicus brief supporting the challengers.
God may have entered the political argument, but the justices will handle the constitutional one.
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