Election Day is closing in on us, and the race to fill John Cornyn’s seat in the U.S. Senate is still pretty tight. Pollsters’ predictions pretty much depend on the political leaning of the pollster.
Texans who use YouTube have been blitzed by ads featuring James Talarico, the Democratic Party’s nominee. Talarico is begging for money, saying the Texas Senate race is one of the most expensive in the history of the Lone Star State. He claims to need the funds to fight right-wing wealth.
The last Texas Democrat in the U.S. Senate was Lloyd Bentsen, and his last election was in 1988. The party is ravenously hungry for another.
According to BallotPedia, Talarico has already been showered with money. As of the June 30th filings, Talarico has received $68.6 million, more than seven times Republican Ken Paxton’s $9.25 million total.
Throughout his four terms as a representative in the Texas House, gun control was never one of Talarico’s hot-button issues. He would vote with the party on gun control measures, but he only introduced a few gun-related bill in eight years. By comparison, other Democrats introduced as many as ten bills in a single session.
That was then; this is now.
Talarico hired Ana Lopez, a gun control activist and formerly one of the leaders of the 2016 “Cocks Not Glocks” protests at the University of Texas at Austin. Lopez is now his legislative aide. She previously assisted Talarico in drafting anti-gun legislation in 2019.
I don’t know whether the hiring was the cause or the effect, but Talarico has become more assertive in his statements. When asked if he would vote for an assault weapons ban, Talarico’s answer was “Absolutely.”
Perhaps Talarico is channelling Beto O’Rourke during his 2019 campaign for the Democratic nomination for President.
”Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” said O’Rourke on September 12, 2019.
“Hell, no, you’re not,” said voters. O’Rourke never even made it to the primaries, dropping out of the crowded field in November.
In 2022, O’Rourke was the Democratic nominee for Texas’ governor. Greg Abbott trounced him with 55% of the vote to Beto’s 44 percent.
Apparently saying he would use government agents, perhaps armed with the banned rifles, to seize legally owned property from law-abiding citizens didn’t sit well with people who remembered Ruby Ridge and Waco.
Somebody should remind Talarico that the seat he wants in the Senate currently belongs to Republican John Cornyn. Cornyn had been elected to the office four times with decent margins but lost a lot of political manna by helping Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy corral enough votes to get the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 through Congress.
Joe Biden’s abuse of the new law didn’t make anything better for Cornyn, who became the first incumbent Texas Senator to lose a reelection bid since Ralph Yarborough in 1970.
What’s puzzling is Talarico’s newfound enthusiasm for an assault weapons ban. For that matter, anybody’s current support for an assault weapons ban is suspect, at the least. Delusion or deception are more likely explanations.
First, the Supreme Court scheduled to hear arguments in the consolidated cases of Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins cases about midway between the November midterms and the convening of the 120th Congress.
Judging by the amicus briefs supporting the plaintiffs, the good guys are coming armed for bear. Just about every claim the ban fans have ever made has been addressed including claims about the “lethality” of the AR-15.
An excellent brief, well worth reading, was filed by E.Gregory Wallace speaking for ballistics experts and Second Amendment law professors.
Speaking to the determined ignorance of gun control zealots, they note that, unless it is used as a club, the AR-15 isn’t lethal at all. The bullet is the lethal component and, compared to other rifle rounds commonly used for hunting, the small projectiles loaded into 5.56 mm/.223 Remington cartridges are nothing to write home about. ARs are available chambered for cartridges like the .338 Lapua, which has 3.6 times the muzzle energy of the overhyped .223.
Everyone is hoping either Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas will write the majority opinion. It needs to be as broad as possible; It needs to forestall the political and judicial hijinks that have plagued the rulings in Heller and Bruen. No repeats of Footnote 9 in Bruen, please!
Ken Paxton needs to toss this in James Talarico’s face. Call Talarico a sucker and a dupe; demand Talarico show a single honest reason, based on verifiable data, that supports an assault weapons ban.
Ask Talarico if he’s gullible or just stupid.
There is no record of an assault weapons ban, in and of itself, preventing a mass shooting. There have been numerous interventions but bans played no part.
The 1994-2004 federal ban was a complete waste of time and taxpayer funds. There were actually more mass shootings and more uses of the banned weapons during the ban than in the ten years preceding the ban. Some tried to gather support for magazine bans by pointing to fewer casualties but that ignores the details of the incidents and the mindset of the shooter.
According to FBI Uniform Crime Reports from 1985 to 2014, use of rifles in homicides declined by a larger percentage in the ten years after the ban’s expiration than during the ban’s decade-long run.
During the 2004 Presidential campaign, George W. Bush said he would sign a renewal of the federal ban if it crossed his desk. Never happened.
However, despite the setbacks dealt by the truth, the assault weapons ban has become the unholy grail of gun control and the zealots in the movement will leave no truth unspurned and no lie left untold until they get it.
Politicians like Adam Schiff, Tim Walz, and others, including James Talarico, love bans because it makes it look like they’re doing something; costs the government virtually nothing (it’s nothing like the Australian “buyback”); and doesn’t have any impact on their friends and allies.
In reality, it is the biggest hoax ever foisted off on the American people by the gun-grabbers. Sorry to keep repeating that point, but it’s true.
The fraudsters try to justify their boogyman by pointing to mass shootings, but how much of that is bogus?
The Gun Violence Archive, popular with the ban fans and media, claims that between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2025, there 5,599 mass shootings in the U.S. Alternatively, the AP/Mother Jones and Violence Project Research Center have databases that use the almost the same definitions of a mass shooting as law enforcement, Congress, and any remaining ethical journalists.
Using the same 12-year GVA timeframe, the number of real mass shootings was 71 or about 1.3% of the 5,599 propaganda claim.
I merged the AP/Mother Jones and Violence Project Center databases, adding omissions; deleting duplicates; and correcting errors.
Over the 77 years since a mass shooting in Camden, New Jersey, there have been 207 incidents involving 213 shooters. Shooter ages range from 11 to 70. Seventeen were between 18 and 20; nine legally purchased a gun and used it to commit a mass shooting. [For context, the Census Bureau estimates there are 13.4 million young American adults in the 18-20 age range.]
More than 455 firearms have been involved with these crimes, from a tiny .25 ACP pistol to a .460 Weatherby Magnum elephant gun. This total includes the arsenal assembled by the Las Vegas killer and guns that were brought to the scene but weren’t used.
Based on the available data, the type, caliber, and brand of each gun was entered, as was the source, wherever possible (and, yes, I did correct some errors in both databases).
So what about the AR-15? Isn’t that an existential threat due to its lethality and ability to do things no firearm has been able to do, looking all the way back to the Chinese fire-lances used in the 12th Century?
From the time the Colt AR-15 Sporter hit the market in early 1964, all the way to today, a total of 70 ARs have been used in mass shootings. That’s right: 70. That is all AR-15s and AR-10s in all chamberings, whether used or not used.
The gun industry estimated there were about 25-30 million ARs in circulation. However, the recently released 2026 National Firearms Survey says there are about 25 million owners of AR-style rifles and the total number of these rifles is closer to 40 million. So about one in every 570,000 was involved in some manner in a mass shooting. If you’re a decimal fan, it works out to about 0.00018% of all ARs.
That’s a very, very small number. It’s also very poor excuse to penalize 25 million Americans who are doing exactly what the founders of our country intended – keeping arms the government is forbidden to control.
Think of it this way: James Talarico and his fellow travelers are the people the founders warned us about.
Note: The source used for the statistics in this article is the Second Amendment Society of Texas. All the original numbers were sourced from reliable, authoritative sources available to the public.
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About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago. He has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
