May 27, 2022 09:56 AM UTC

Defending Colorado's hard-won leadership on gun safety

• 5 Comments
• by: MissingPundit

(Remembering lawmakers who sacrificed their careers for gun safety — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

From Columbine to Aurora to this week at Uvalde, Colorado’s experience as a victim and witness to mass gun violence now stretches back over 23 years. And Colorado’s response to these tragedies and the increasing radicalization of the right-wing show a parallel that we’re witnessing nationwide, as the federal government is paralyzed from acting in response to these events.

After Columbine and a horrific domestic violence shooting in Castle Rock in 1999, a Republican governor supported efforts to to close the gun show loophole and restore Colorado’s insta-check program over objections from the hard right. It’s hard to imagine anything close to that dynamic playing out at that level of the Republican Party today.

Since 2000, the gun pressure groups that opposed then-Gov. Bill Owens more or less took the reins of the party and replicated that success nationally by morphing a debate about gun laws into another apocalyptic culture war.

After tragedy struck again in a movie theater in Aurora in July of 2012, Gov. Hickenlooper called for universal background checks. And the headline for that announcement ran in the newspaper the morning of the Newtown massacre. In the following 2013 legislative session, new laws to expand background checks, limit ammunition magazines, and toughen protection orders met with a furious backlash that subsumed everything else in the Republican Party. Two Democratic legislators were recalled, and a third was replaced by one of the recall proponents after resigning under threat.

Then after a Douglas County Sheriff deputy Zach Parrish was murdered on New Year’s Eve 2017, the “Red Flag” extreme risk protection order law to give law enforcement the tools to remove weapons from people posing an imminent threat took two more years until Colorado’s Democratic trifecta won in 2018 finally passed the legislation, and Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law in 2019.

Again, in the wake of these advancements, a backlash engineered by the party’s base resulted in multiple recall attempts. The most notorious recall campaign against Rep. Tom Sullivan, who lost his son in the Aurora theater shooting, was initiated by Kristi Burton Brown and coordinated with Colorado’s extreme gun rights pressure group, the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. Brown would abandon her effort but has since been rewarded with her elevation to the chairmanship of the Colorado Republican Party.

Meanwhile, even modest reforms in Congress with bipartisan support have stalled in the face of Senate filibusters and the iron tight grip the gun lobby holds on Republican primary voters.

The right’s response to massacre after massacre, despite the number and age of the victims, has been to flood the streets with more guns and demand fewer restrictions on gun purchases. Had Colorado been governed by a uniformly Republican legislature at any point in the last ten years, there’s no doubt the state would be following the path of Texas, Georgia, and others. The stark partisan divide over guns makes the choice at the ballot box easy for Colorado voters, who like the rest of the country continue to support common-sense gun safety measures.