March 25, 2023 01:12 PM UTC

House Republicans: We Don't Care About Gun Violence Stories

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• by: Colorado Pols

[mantra-pullquote align=”right” textalign=”left” width=”60%”]“[Democrats] will say, ‘You’ve got your side of the argument and it’s the Constitution, but we’ve got real, live people on our side.’

“And we’re like, ‘We don’t care.’”

     — State Rep. Scott Bottoms (R-Colorado Springs)[/mantra-pullquote]

House Republicans are spending their first Saturday of Spring on another inevitably-pointless “filibluster” related to gun violence prevention legislation that Democrats are moving through the State Capitol.

Today’s attempted filibuster comes at the end of a week that began with the shooting of two staff members at East High School in Denver and ended with students descending on the Capitol building to plead for help in enacting new gun violence prevention measures. As we noted on Friday, Republicans in the state legislature responded to these desperate calls for help by treating students as a nuisance; State Sen. Larry Liston (R-Colorado Springs) wrote on Twitter: “How would you feel if rude and impertinent 15/16 year olds barged into your office unannounced and berated you for an unfortunate situation that you had nothing to do with?”

As Kyle Clark of 9News reported on Friday evening, Liston’s horrible comments were only the tip of the iceberg from Republicans. Last Wednesday — AFTER the East High School shootings — State Rep. Scott “There is No” Bottoms (R-Colorado Springs) flatly told an audience at a local church that the Republican response to personal stories of being impacted by gun violence was to flatly state, “We don’t care.”

Colorado’s GOP legislators are dismissing citizens coming to the Capitol to advocate for gun control. Sen. @LarryListon10 said East High students were “rude and impertinent” and Rep Scott Bottoms said they “don’t care” about testimony that’s “all about feelings.” #copolitics pic.twitter.com/WLA4VPBuRu

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) March 25, 2023

The “filibluster” that Rep. Bottoms promised to undertake on Friday evening instead began today. Members of the Republican micro-minority in the State House have been droning on for hours in opposition to SB23-170, an addition to Colorado’s successful “red flag” law that seeks to expand the list of people who can petition for an “extreme risk protection order” to temporarily remove a firearm from the possession of a person believed to be an immediate risk to themselves or others. This bill is a common sense addition to a program that has already been proven to save lives in Colorado, but that matters little to a Colorado Republican Party that now operates as little more than a subsidiary of the “no compromise” gun group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO).

Republican lawmakers literally don’t care about how gun violence might impact Coloradans or their communities. They’re not even pretending otherwise.