Craig is a small town of about 9000 in far northwest Colorado, while slightly larger Sterling sits in the northeast corner of the state. These towns are different in many ways, though they share a rural Colorado character. Neither is known for having an abundance of mines, meaning the kind that blow up when stepped on.
Despite this, however, both of these towns’ police departments obtained mine resistant vehicles as military surplus.
Uncle Sam’s armory
They’re not alone. The Department of Defense maintains records on all the military surplus equipment sent to Colorado police departments, and a look at the list shows that sheriff’s offices and police agencies all over the state are outfitted with this military equipment.
The School of Mines Public Safety Department in Golden has some, as does the Colorado State Patrol. Little Alamosa PD is listed as getting 9 separate explosive ordinance disposal robots between October 27th, 1994 and October 31st of that same year. Yes 9 of them.
It isn’t just quizzical items either. Civilian law enforcement all over Colorado has military-grade rifles, night vision, robots, armored trucks, a variety of handguns, infrared imaging and more received between 1993 and 2026. One of the most popular items was small arms. I counted 450 5.56 mm rifles, 236 7.62 mm rifles, and 121 handguns.
How is this possible? It’s all thanks to the 1033 LESO Excess Property Program, run by a coordinator out of the Colorado Department of Public Safety. Stretching back to the early 1990s, the program allows the transfer of military surplus equipment to law enforcement agencies around the country, with some obvious restrictions. For example, the equipment must be “demilitarized” (where they remove things the public shouldn’t know about or have access to). Cops can’t have a 50 caliber machine gun mounted on top of a tank, for example, but a surprising amount of military hardware is available for your local police department..
I don’t want those who risk their lives to protect me and my family to be outclassed by criminals, but I have some serious concerns about this. We have a longstanding tradition in this country of civilian law enforcement being just that–civilian. The barest hint of the US military being pointed inward makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to get a wave from Officer Friendly as he passes my house in a mine resistant vehicle.
The gun grabber dilemma
What’s surprising to me is how little concern there seems to be among majority Democrats about this, particularly from the more progressive members. One would struggle to total up the quantity of words spoken and written by them about “defunding” the police or distrusting the judicial system, yet I can’t think of the last time I heard one of them mention military equipment used by those same police.
You’d think there’d be all kinds of heartburn about it.
Further, does anyone care to take a bet as to whether the M16 and M14 rifles the police get from the military would be allowed for civilian use in Colorado? They are almost certainly the very kind of so-called “assault weapons” that Senator Tom Sullivan and his fellow gun grabbers rail against. Not just guns that look like the type the military would use, these are guns the military actually uses! I bet my lunch these guns would be on the Department of Revenue’s list for firearms you now need a permission slip from the government to have.
I look over the list of military guns and equipment coming to civilian law enforcement and put that next to the silence from our state level progressives, and it almost suggests that for Colorado’s rights restricting policymakers, the guns actually matter less than who gets their hands on them, individual citizens or agents of the state.
Cory Gaines teaches college physics and is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. He also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack.
