During an appearance on the Unity Over Division podcast, U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico (D) suggested it was “common sense” to mandate how guns are stored in homes and to ban private sales.
Talarico said, “I am a believer in the Second Amendment. I don’t pick and choose between the Bill of Rights, I believe in the Second Amendment just as much as I believe in the first.”
He went on to state his conviction that you need to get a permit to exercise the First Amendment right to assemble, then outlined gun controls that he described as “common sense.”
Talarico said, “We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got safe storage laws and background checks so that we’re keeping everybody safe.”
On May 29, 2026, Breitbart News reported that on Talarico’s campaign website, under the heading Public Safety & Justice, it is clear that securing universal background checks is one of Talarico’s “priorities.” Such checks criminalize the private gun sales Americans have enjoyed since the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, and while doing so, they do not prevent determined attackers from getting their hands on guns.
Case in point: California has had universal background checks since the 1990s but they led the nation in “active shooter incidents” from 2020-2024.
Talarico’s campaign website also makes clear that another gun control he plans to pursue is raising the minimum purchase age for AR-15s and other wildly popular semiautomatic rifles.
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