Colorado's Egregious Anti-Gun Law Just Went Into Effect, and Here's What It Does
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Colorado's new gun law doesn't ban anything outright. That's the tell. Starting this month, the state requires anyone buying most semiautomatic firearms to first complete a hunter safety course, get fingerprinted, and secure eligibility approval before they can even walk out of the store with a legally purchased rifle.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Democrats rarely come out and directly enact their policies. For example, instead of a blanket ban on free speech, they collude with social media companies to censor people who were critical of, say, the COVID pandemic response and vaccines.
Or they classify speech they don't like as mis/disinformation and censor it that way. In New York City, the socialists running the show won't actually walk up to buildings and seize property from homeowners and landlords—a platform Mayor Mamdani's housing advisor, Cea Weaver, believes in—instead, they'll issue onerous tax bills and other burdensome laws to justify taking your property "legally."
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Colorado's new gun law doesn't ban anything outright. That's the tell. Starting this month, the state requires anyone buying most semiautomatic firearms to first complete a hunter safety course, get fingerprinted, and secure eligibility approval before they can even walk out of the store with a legally purchased rifle. Nobody in Denver had to stand up and say "we're banning modern rifles." They just buried the right under enough paperwork, fees, and bureaucratic checkpoints that plenty of law-abiding people will give up before they finish the process.
This is the pattern now, and it's worth naming plainly. Progressive governments have figured out that the direct approach invites lawsuits and backlash, so they've gotten good at achieving the same outcome through friction. Can't ban speech, so you lean on platforms to do it for you. Can't seize someone's building outright, so you tax and regulate it until the owner sells at a loss. Can't confiscate firearms, so you turn a constitutional right into a bureaucratic obstacle course only the most determined or well-resourced citizens can clear.
What makes Colorado's version particularly galling is who it actually burdens. A rural hunter or a single mom in Pueblo who wants a rifle for self-defense doesn't have a lobbyist or a lawyer on retainer. They have a Tuesday off work, maybe, to drive to a class. The people this law slows down aren't criminals, who were never filling out ATF paperwork to begin with. They're the ordinary Coloradans the Second Amendment was written to protect.
Call it what it is instead of what it's labeled. A law that doesn't ban a right but makes exercising it exhausting enough that fewer people bother is still an attack on that right. Coloradans deserve legislators willing to say what they mean instead of engineering compliance costs and calling it safety policy.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.