February 14, 2014 01:03 PM UTC

Holy Hypocrisy, Randy Baumgardner!

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Colorado Independent's John Tomasic reports:

It was a 30-year-old High Standard nine-shot nickel-plated revolver with imitation pearl handles and it was lying on a shelf in the front hallway closet at state Senator Randy Baumgardner’s house in Hot Sulfur Springs. And then it was gone.

In the report he made to the Grand County Sheriff’s office, Baumgardner said he suspected no burglar came and took the gun. It was more likely someone who knew it was just sitting there in the closet, like maybe his stepson, 24-year-old Michael Gramm, who had recently taken a job in Texas. [Pols emphasis] Baumgardner didn’t want to make trouble for his stepson. He just wanted to make sure the fact the gun was missing was recorded and that, if it ever turned up, he might get it back.

The police report is dated 2012.

How is this relevant today, you ask? Well…

Baumgardner today will be testifying in favor of a bill he has introduced to expand exceptions to a law passed last year that requires background checks for non-purchase gun transfers. The law now says that immediate family members don’t have to get background checks to trade firearms. Baumgardner wants the law to include step-relatives as part of the family members exempted from background checks.

Now folks, we're not making a judgment about this particular bill, which some readers might reasonably support. But it's tough to imagine a worse story to come out about the sponsor of a bill to ease restrictions on gun transfers to step-relatives than his own weird police contact over the possibility his own stepson had stolen his gun. After all, isn't the whole premise of Sen. Randy Baumgardner's Senate Bill 14-090 that you can trust your step-relatives?

Baumgardner's bill was likely to die anyway, but this ought to give it a rousing send-off.