Buried well into a 3,570-word essay in the Denver Post about how gun control laws have “reshaped” gun ownership in Colorado is a revealing paragraph about the results of passing a series of restrictive measures and what has happened in the years since this process started.
Under the subhead of “But do the laws work?” is this:
“One of the 2021 gun laws championed by (State Sen. Tom) Sullivan created the state Office of Gun Violence Prevention to, among other things, track gun deaths in Colorado. And in raw and per-capita numbers, they’ve risen overall since 2013.
“In 2014, the first full year of the post-Aurora laws, the state reported 86 gun homicides, or 1.9 per 100,000 people; in 2023, the most recent year with available data, 237 people were killed with guns in homicides, or about 5 per 100,000 residents.
“In that same time frame, the number of gun suicides grew from 527 a year, or 9.9 per 100,000 people, to 673, or 11.5 per 100,000 people.”
Sullivan is a Centennial Democrat whose son was one of the victims of the Aurora movie theater mass shooting in 2012. He ran for office on a gun control platform, and he has been pushing gun restrictions ever since.
The report also contains this paragraph: “Since 2021 alone, Democrats have passed two dozen new gun laws that have affected, among other things, who can own them, sell them and buy them; how gun owners can stow them; how the state taxes and tracks firearms; which guns it allows; who can carry them and where; and who can invoke the state’s red-flag law, as part of an expansion of the 2019 extreme risk protection measure that has allowed authorities to take guns away from their owners temporarily.”
In essence, the article indicates all of the restrictive gun control measures adopted over the past decade haven’t reduced gun-related violent crime. And, it clearly identifies which political party has been pushing the gun laws, which only seem to affect honest citizens.
Colorado isn’t the only place where gun control laws have not fulfilled their promises, and violent crime has increased, rather than decreased.
In Washington state, starting with passage of gun control Initiative 594 in 2014, the annual body counts just crept upward until 2022-2023. In 2015, the first full year after I594 was passed, 209 people were murdered in Washington state, and by 2022, the count had risen to 394 slayings. By 2023, the number backed down to 376 homicides, but it remains higher than in the pre-pandemic years.
It boils down to a remark by Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. He was talking about the failed policies in New York which did not prevent a killer armed with a rifle from entering a Manhattan office building and murdering four people several days ago. Gottlieb described New York’s anti-gun policies as “dead wrong,” but the assessment could have applied to Colorado, Washington or any other jurisdiction.
California, with its restrictive gun laws, led the country in homicides in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. According to Statista, the Golden State racked up 1,929 slayings in 2023.
If those laws worked, California should have trailed behind Texas and Florida, both of which have moderate gun laws and more than a million people licensed to carry in each state. They placed second and third, respectively, in 2023 slayings.
In Washington, Democrats have also been responsible for the gun control push. Ditto in neighboring Oregon and further south in California. But those laws are being challenged. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just declared California’s background check requirement to purchase ammunition is unconstitutional. The Oregon State Supreme Court is now looking at the constitutionality of anti-gun Measure 114, and in Washington, gun control laws are also being challenged in state and federal court.
As previously reported by AmmoLand, homicides in the Evergreen State have started to decline, while the number of citizens with active concealed pistol licenses has soared to more than 713,000, according to new data from the state Department of Licensing.
Back in Colorado, Democrat House Majority Leader Monica Duran told the Denver Post she is “proud of where we have come in the legislature when it comes to being true to our convictions, our commitments — to really making an impact and changing the way we look at gun safety and talking about that issue.” She sponsored “nearly a third of the new gun laws,” the newspaper reported.
Duran reportedly has a concealed carry permit, and she “rejected the suggestion that any of those laws infringe on individual rights,” the Denver Post said.
Adding more barriers to gun ownership will likely discourage more people from exercising their rights, which seemed to be what Ray Elliott, president of the Colorado State Shooting Association, intimated in a comment to the newspaper.
“All those rules and laws and everything going on make (gun ownership) more and more onerous, more and more restrictive,” Elliott reportedly stated. “And as you put up barriers like that, (gun control advocates) know exactly what they’re doing. Less and less people are going to jump through the hoops.”
It will take court rulings to undo restrictive gun control laws, or a change in political power in the states where Democrats currently hold sway. One may currently seem as distant as the other.
Where conservatives may cling to their guns and Bibles, as former President Barack Obama once contended, liberals cling to what has been repeatedly shown to be the false belief that restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens will somehow convince criminals and crazy people to stop committing acts of violence. It hasn’t worked so far and doubling down might only make things worse, considering what has happened so far in the Centennial State.
Data: Washington Homicides Decline While Concealed Carry Increased
Bad Timing: Rolling Stone Rips CCW as MI Citizen Acts, WA CPL Hits Record
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
