In the aftermath of Democrat Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’ signing of what Straight Arrow News called “one of the nation’s most restrictive gun regulation bills into law,” reaction from the Second Amendment community has been scathing.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation issued a blistering statement condemning the governor’s inking of Senate Bill 3, calling it “unconstitutional on its face.”
“It is a gun control group spurred attack on the Second Amendment rights of those who follow the law,” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF’s senior vice president and general counsel. “Colorado lawmakers who claim Gov. Polis’ gun ban will make their state safer have yet to offer legislation that would hold criminals accountable for the criminal misuse of firearms. Instead, they violate the rights of those who obey the law.”
The National Rifle Association had a similar perspective. NRA-ILA Executive Director John Commerford issued a statement in which he blasted Polis for “cowardly” signing the law “behind closed doors.” He called the legislation “the most anti-gun, anti-freedom bill in Colorado’s history.”
“Instead of respecting the individual liberties of gun owners and hunters in his state,” Commerford said, “he bent the knee to the radical gun control element of his party. In Jared’s Colorado, you need a Polis permission slip to exercise your constitutional rights. If this proposal was popular with his citizens, it would not need to be enacted in secret.”
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, listed Colorado among 12 states he has asked U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate with her recently-announced “Second Amendment Task Force.”
“The time has come,” Gottlieb said, “to put the anti-rights leadership in these states on notice that their crusade to destroy the individual rights protected by the Second Amendment is finished. On behalf of our members and supporters, we’re hopeful Attorney General Bondi brings the full force of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division against these Draconian gun control laws wherever they have been enacted.”
According to NSSF’s analysis, “Colorado’s SB25-003 makes Second Amendment rights in Colorado only permissible with a state-approved permission slip. It is an attack on the lawful sale of the most popular-selling centerfire rifles in America – the MSR or AR-15 – of which there are over 30 million in circulation today. Those firearms are used for lawful purposes daily, including recreational target shooting, hunting and self-defense. SB25-003 also bans the sale of semiautomatic shotguns and pistols that can accept detachable magazines, unless lawful purchasers obtain similar approval from county sheriffs and obtain a permit-to-purchase.”
Colorado, like the other 11 states on CCRKBA’s “priority list” for the Department of Justice’s “2A Task Force,” is run by a Democrat majority in the legislature, and it has a Democrat in the Governor’s office. As noted by CCRKBA’s Gottlieb in a statement to the media, “In the aftermath of the 2022 Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling, radical gun prohibitionists have only doubled down in their culture war against law-abiding gun owners and the Second Amendment. Their efforts amount to deprivation of rights under color of law, and this scenario cannot be allowed to continue. It is time to put an end to this nonsense and remind these zealots that the Bill of Rights is not a menu from which we can pick and choose which parts we want while throwing other parts in the trash.”
