Once upon a time, Colorado looked like a pretty good place to live. Not only does the state have some amazing views and outdoor recreation opportunities, but it was a pro-gun state, too.
But then everything changed.
The Aurora theater shooting started the state down a path that has gotten darker and darker since the magazine capacity limits were first passed in the wake of that incident.
And it’s kind of a case study in just what can happen.
Teddy Collins moved his young family to Colorado Springs from Texas in 2017, lured by its safety, its reputation as an excellent place to live and its well-known conservative disposition. He also arrived with a plan: He would open a gun store in the city.
Sure, he thought, Colorado had enacted a 15-round limit on firearm magazines earlier that decade, in response to the 2012 Aurora movie theater massacre. But the state otherwise was known at the time for its swing-state purple politics and gun laws that were not otherwise far out of step with the rest of the Mountain West.
As he settled into his new home, however — and before he could open his store — a raft of soon-to-be lawmakers with more ambitious gun-regulation agendas were launching campaigns across the state. The Democrats would take full control of state government in the 2018 blue wave election, and their legislative majorities would go on to pass a slate of laws over the next seven years that established sweeping new standards for gun sales and ownership.
“At that time, we still had the 15-round magazine capacity limit, but we did not have three-day waits — we did not have all this other bureaucratic stuff,” Collins said. “We did not have restrictions on licenses like we see now. We didn’t have SB-3. We didn’t have an excise tax.
“Over the years, just slowly, slowly, Colorado has gone the way — and I fear we’re going the way — of California.”
The sweep of new laws started relatively slowly, with 2019’s extreme risk protection order law. But the pace of new restrictions has picked up unmistakably since then, with lawmakers putting stricter and broader rules on nearly all facets of firearms. Those efforts culminated this spring with the passage of Senate Bill 3 — a law that, when it goes into effect in August 2026, will restrict the sale of many semiautomatic firearms that have detachable magazines unless the buyer has passed a safety course.
Let’s note that at each step in the process, anti-gunners would continually say, “All we want is X,” and try to pretend anyone who didn’t want X was also trying to arm criminals and psychopaths.
Then, they got what they demanded, and the goalpost shifted.
Each and every step has resulted in more and more being asked. A friend of mine created the well-known cake metaphor for how we lost our gun rights over the years. Colorado is a case study in just how that works.
They gave up 30-round magazines in the wake of a mass shooting because people were upset, and hey, it’s not the end of the world, right?
Yet step by step, the state has embraced more and more anti-gun rhetoric as if it were established fact and has restricted more and more. They went from the simple and relatively well-favored red flag law to banning pretty much every semi-auto unless you go through a government-mandated class that will, in time, become far more problematic than it is right now.
This is what happens every time, though.
They swear they just need this one thing to make everything better, but then they get it and immediately want something else. Then they need that thing to make everything better.
And when it makes nothing better, well, that’s good news for them because they can leverage that as evidence they need that one thing or the next thing or whatever. In the eyes of the activists and media, gun control never fails unless it just doesn’t go far enough.
Colorado is a prime example of what will go wrong.
Collins said his state is becoming like California, but once upon a time, Californians had the majority of their gun rights respected by the state, too.
It never starts with California-level gun control. It will always end up there, if not worse, if you give them any ground.
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