The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the state’s premier law enforcement agency, currently is letting rapists roam free because it is some 500 days behind in processing DNA evidence, due partly to an analyst there botching hundreds of tests, according to Colorado Public Radio (CPR).
Although “the country’s murder rate is falling at a brisk pace,” trends in Colorado are “mostly flat,” another CPR story reports.
Yes, auto thefts are down, CBS reports, but this is after Colorado had the worst auto theft rate in the nation in 2022.
“A Colorado apartment complex where armed members of a Venezuelan gang were caught on video entering a unit last summer is expected to close in about a month under an emergency court order,” the AP reports.
Recently a man with 15 prior arrests, deemed by the courts to pose “substantial risk of serious harm to others,” allegedly stabbed four people on the 16th Street Mall in Denver, two fatally, the Gazette reports.
Given these ongoing problems with crimes against people and their property, our state legislature is laser-focused on…diverting limited law enforcement resources to hassling the millions of gun owners in Colorado who have never harmed anyone.
Flagrantly unconstitutional
The latest is Senate Bill 25-003, which pertains to “a semiautomatic rifle or semiautomatic shotgun with a detachable magazine or a gas-operated semiautomatic handgun with a detachable magazine.” The bill makes it a crime to “knowingly manufacture, distribute, transfer, sell, or purchase” such a gun, with a few exceptions, including transfers to heirs.
Of course the bill excepts law enforcement and military agencies, because these Democrats believe that some Coloradans are more equal than others and that government agents must be better-armed than other citizens. This despite Democratic candidate for president Kamala Harris calling the new head of the federal government a “fascist.” The bill defines a first offense as a Class 2 Misdemeanor and a “second or subsequent offense” as a Class 6 felony.
According to the Denver Post, these Democrats wanted to ban the “sale, manufacture or purchase of semiautomatic weapons that use detachable magazines.” The bill as introduced exempts “a single or double action semiautomatic handgun that uses recoil to cycle the action of the handgun.” I guess the sponsors thought it would be in bad form to ban the sort of gun that Harris bragged about owning. The bill also excepts .22 caliber guns. Still, the bill constitutes a breathtaking effort to ban the sale of many types of popular guns used for recreation and (more importantly) self-defense.
Senate Bill 3 flagrantly violates both the U.S. and Colorado constitutions, the latter of which affirms “the right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property . . . shall be called in question. . .” That the bill would not survive judicial scrutiny seems not to matter at all to the bill’s sponsors, who apparently enjoy throwing taxpayer dollars into losing efforts to legally defend the indefensible.
The Democratic position is inherently untenable. The reason that they want to ban these guns for most citizens, but not for police officers, is that they are effective. What makes them effective for law enforcement and for crime also makes them effective for self-defense. According to American ideals of justice, we don’t hold the millions of peaceable gun owners responsible for the violent crimes of the few.
Punishing the innocent
No one who lives in Colorado can ignore the problem of mass shootings. Tom Sullivan, a sponsor of the bill, lost his son to the 2012 Aurora theater murders, something no parent should have to endure. But stripping the rights of the many in an attempt to stop the few who commit crimes is not the answer. Instead, the answer is to focus on those who commit or threaten to commit crimes.
In the Aurora case, the perpetrator “told a classmate he wanted to kill people four months before the shooting,” NBC reports. Just throwing this out there, but . . . maybe law enforcement agencies should take seriously people who threaten to commit murder, before it’s too late, whether that means mental health help or increased law-enforcement observation or contact.
Is there any level of restrictions on gun owners that will be enough for these Democrats? It seems like whatever restrictions already are in place, Democrats always will demand more.
In 2013, the legislature banned gun magazines over fifteen rounds. In 2019, the legislature passed a “red flag” law enabling law enforcement to take guns from dangerous people. I support this measure at least in principle, even if I might quibble with details. In 2023, the legislature passed a waiting period for gun purchases. The list goes on.
In discussing the new proposal, Sullivan has complained that the magazine ban has not been well-enforced and that it’s pointless, anyway, given “the easy ability to drop one magazine and put another magazine in there and just continue to fire.”
So, apparently the idea is that, because the legislature previously passed pointless, poorly-enforced gun restrictions, it now should pass additional restrictions. On the other hand, if you did think that restricting magazines was effective, presumably you would call for the robust enforcement of that law prior to imposing new controls.
I do want to draw people’s attention to something. The perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine murders were ages 18 and 17; of the 2012 Aurora theater murders, 24; of the 2021 Boulder murders, 21; of the 2022 Club Q murders, 22. Are you seeing a trend here?
The New York Times reports that “roughly 15 to 25” is “a critical age range that law enforcement officials, researchers and policy experts consider a hazardous crossroads for young men, a period when they are in the throes of developmental changes and societal pressures that can turn them toward violence in general, and, in the rarest cases, mass shootings.”
There’s also a problem of “people in their 40s who commit workplace type shootings,” a criminal justice professor told the Times. But there does seem to be some evidence that the brain does not fully develop until about age 25.
We’ve already decided to phase-in the legal age of adulthood, as people cannot buy nicotine, alcohol, or (since 2023) guns until they are 21. At least so long as the federal government requires people age 18 to register for the draft, I don’t think this is fair. But, if Congress repealed draft registration (or at least raised the age to 25), Democrats could make a plausible argument for raising the age to purchase a semiautomatic gun with a detachable magazine to 25. That would be a harder proposal for critics to fight. This would not, of course, prevent all younger people intent on committing a crime from getting such a gun.
I don’t have a problem with Senate Bill 3’s ban of bump-stocks and the like, which increase the effective firing rate of a gun.
We should ask people in law enforcement to focus their energies on people who have committed rights-violating crimes or who have threatened to do so. We should not ask people in law enforcement to spend their time and resources hounding people who have harmed no one. With its blanket gun sales bans, Senate Bill 3 is a step in the wrong direction.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.