February 10, 2025 02:45 PM UTC

Sorting Fact From Fiction On This Year's Big Gun Bill

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

As KUNC’s Lucas Brady Woods reports in the Colorado Sun, the most contentious piece of gun safety legislation proposed this year in the Colorado General Assembly has entered the backroom sausagemaking phase, as proponents negotiate with Gov. Jared Polis on the right language for a bill that would have significant–but widely misunderstood–effects on what kinds of guns are legal for sale in our state:

After gearing up for a big legislative fight on the Senate floor, state lawmakers postponed debate Friday on a proposed ban on the manufacture and sale of certain semiautomatic rifles, shotguns and handguns that can accept detachable ammunition magazines.

The main sponsors of Senate Bill 3, Democratic Sens. Tom Sullivan of Centennial and Julie Gonzales of Denver, said the delay is because negotiations with the governor’s office over the measure are ongoing.

“We’re working our way through it, and when we get finished, we’ll be in a positive place, and we’ll get that to his desk for him to sign,” Sullivan said Friday morning.

As has been historically the case with each major piece of gun-related legislation since Democrats in Colorado first began to confront the issue in earnest in 2013, there is tremendous alarm over this bill among the politically well-organized gun rights community both locally and across the nation–much of it based on fundamental misunderstandings of the bill’s intent and plain language. The legislation is primarily intended to restrict access to AR-15 assault rifles and similar models of weapons that have been overwhelmingly the choice of mass shooters in recent years.

What most opponents don’t know about the bill, or perhaps pretending they don’t know, is that most semiautomatic handguns are not affected by the legislation. The bill only prohibits weapons with a “gas-powered” mechanism of the kind utilized by assault rifles, not the “recoil-powered” system used by just about all semiauto handguns. Most of the public doesn’t understand the difference, but it’s very important in terms of what kinds of guns are affected by Senate Bill 3.

A story from 9NEWS on Friday quotes a gun store owner who is either doesn’t know the facts about the bill, or is deliberately spreading misinformation like most of the opponents who describe this bill as a blanket “semiauto ban.”

“If the bill were to be enacted, it would cut down our sales by about 95%,” Hymanson said. “Really, we have very few customers that are coming in for bolt-action [rifles] or revolvers. It really is standard concealed carry, self-defense, hunting and competition.”

Hymanson said most of her rifles and handguns have detachable magazines, which allow users to quickly load and unload multiple cartridges from the firearm.

“Because this magazine is detached from this firearm, we would not be able to sell this,” Hymanson said while holding a handgun in one hand and a magazine in another. “And so, it’s basically with this simple motion, it makes it illegal for us to sell.”

Folks, none of this is true–unless 95% of this gun store’s inventory consists of AR-15s, and in all probability not the pistol she was holding claiming it would be illegal simply because its magazine comes out. The language of Senate Bill 3 is very clear that recoil-operated handguns are not affected by the bill’s restrictions, so either this gun store owner did not read the legislation, or is sufficiently ignorant about it that we can reasonably question her qualifications to operate a gun store.

Back in 2013, panicked misinformation about that year’s gun safety bills contributed to irrational recalls against several Democratic state senators, a setback that took several years and the successful resumption of the gun safety agenda in 2019 for Democrats to finally shake off. Whatever the outcome of Senate Bill 3, which even its sponsors admit is an ambitious solution to reducing the death toll in mass shootings, the debate over the bill needs to be fact-based. The public would react very differently to Senate Bill 3 if its narrow scope was not subject to this kind of wild misrepresentation.

As for why the gun lobby is always rushing to correct opponents on technicalities, yet content to let misinformation about guns flow if it serves their purposes, you’ll have to ask them.