Gun owners across the land breathed a sigh of relief on Monday at the news that the sponsor of a Colorado “assault weapons” ban is pulling her bill from consideration one day before the legislative session ends.
Said Senator Julie Gonzales, “After thoughtful conversations with my Senate colleagues, I decided that more conversations need to take place outside of the pressure cooker of the Capitol during the last weeks of the legislative session.”
But she’s not done with pushing for the total ban on so-called assault weapons: “I look forward to renewing and continuing those discussions.… It is clear that survivors of devastating gun violence, responsible gun owners, and local and national policy advocates remain committed to doing the work necessary to save lives — and an assault weapons ban will do just that.”
Representative Tim Hernandez, who sponsored a similar bill last year that failed in committee, was more direct. When asked why the bill had to be shelved, he said simply that “folks aren’t ready. That’s what it boils down to.”
Some of that can be attributed to efforts by Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO), whose members made more than 65,000 phone calls and sent more than 150,000 emails in opposition to the measure. On a social-media post, the group celebrated: “It’s dead!!! We have officially KILLED the 2024 “Assault Weapons ban”! Thank you ALL for your hard work and activism to make this happen.”
The bill, had it passed the Senate (after successfully passing the House earlier) and been signed into law, would have banned the purchase, sale, and transfer of a broad swath of semiautomatic firearms. It defined “assault weapons” as semiautomatic rifles with any of a long list of accessories that made them look scary, along with semiautomatic pistols, shotguns with revolving cylinders, and semiautomatic shotguns.
It would have punished first-time offenders with a fine of $250,000 and repeat offenders with fines of $500,000.
The bill’s sponsor and supporters are leftists, ignoring both the state and federal constitutions and their oaths of office to support and defend them. Article II, Section 13 of the Colorado Constitution states: “The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person, and property, or aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question; but nothing herein contained shall be construed to justify the practice of carrying concealed weapons.”
The U.S. Constitution has similar, albeit briefer, language: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Not only does Gonzales ignore those restraints, her voting record, as provided by the John Birch Society’s Freedom Index, shows her disdain for those limits and guarantees. Her lifetime record is a treasonous 17 out of 100. Democrat Representative Meg Froehlich of Denver (Freedom Index rating of 25 out of 100) made it clear that such constitutional restraints meant nothing to her as she supported the bill: “The arguments against a ban are policy arguments, but the arguments for it are from the heart.”
Democrat Senator President Steve Fenberg (Freedom Index rating of 17 out of 100) suffers from the same malady, explaining:
There are a lot of folks, I think, in my caucus, that have a complicated relationship with this bill in different ways. Every legislator has the responsibility and authority to have a nuanced position on policy, on any policy.
The predicate of the bill itself reveals its complete divorce from reality:
Assault weapons and high-capacity magazines are disproportionately used in public mass shootings, and the reasons are both obvious and irrefutable. Assault weapons are uniquely lethal by design. They entail tactical features designed for warfare, refined to maximize killing large numbers of people quickly and efficiently.
Except that they aren’t, and they don’t. John Lott’s research, courtesy of his Crime Prevention Research Center, reveals that the percentage of gun murders committed by shooters using AR-15s and AK-47s is less than three percent. As Lott himself noted, “With all the concern about assault weapons since the federal ban [the 1994 Clinton gun ban] ended in 2004, it is interesting to see what a small share of murders are committed with any type of rifle, and how even that share has fallen over time.”
For the anti-gun politicians now infesting the once-red state of Colorado, none of this matters. Neither history, common sense, facts, or even the threat that the Bruen ruling from the Supreme Court in 2022 would ultimately negate their efforts have deterred them from their quest to disarm Coloradans and deprive them of precious rights guaranteed in both the state and federal constitutions. The present battle has been won, but the war continues.
