from our state association
The Revised Semi-Auto Ban is Even Worse Than the Original
After speaking extensively with our legal team, we have a more complete understanding of what Senate Bill 25-003 will now mean for Colorado gun owners should it become law after being amended so heavily. The basics are that this bill is now, in many ways, even worse than it was before the amendments.
Under Senate Bill 3 in its new form, Coloradans will be eligible to purchase any of the firearms this bill restricts only if they’ve completed the following actions:
- Received from their Sheriff, after submitting their fingerprints for a criminal background screening, an eligibility/ID card that qualifies them to participate in a firearms safety course.
- Having received the eligibility/ID card from their Sheriff, completed an extended firearms safety course within five years before the purchase, or completed both a hunter safety course and a basic firearms safety course within five years before the purchase.
- Having completed all the steps above, passed an exam testing their knowledge of the safety course’s subject matter with a score not less than 90 percent.
If you think that jumbled web of bureaucratic red tape is bad, we are only getting started explaining all of the new implications of this bill.
To receive the above-mentioned eligibility/ID card, you must pay a processing fee to the Sheriff’s Office. To take the courses required for eligibility to access the restricted firearms, you must pay a fee, in an amount to be determined by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, to the instructor of the course who will then remit the fee to the State to fund another egregious part of this bill that we will touch on momentarily.
Sheriffs issuing the eligibility/ID card will be required to submit the card’s information (your full name, the county of issuance, and the signature of the issuing Sheriff) to the “Training and Safety Course Record System” which this bill would create, to be funded by the fee you will pay the instructor. If that sounds like a means to build a state-owned list of individuals who are very likely to own semi-automatic firearms, that’s because it is exactly that. And we mustn’t forget that creating a list of gun owners is almost always an early step in the process of confiscating arms.
The bill also grants the Sheriff what would appear to be unchecked discretion to deny or revoke these eligibility cards if the Sheriff believes that “documented previous behavior” by the applicant or cardholder makes it likely the person could present a danger to themself or others. The bill does not specify what kind of “documented previous behavior” should trigger a denial or revocation. According to the language of this bill, the only standard for denial or revocation is any particular Sheriff’s “reasonable belief” that a person should not hold an eligibility card. For all the bill tells us, the “documented previous behavior” could be something like a past Facebook post referring to the American founders’ belief that the Second Amendment ought to exist so the citizenry can defend against a tyrannical government. In any case, you can’t even get to the starting line of the series of hoops they’ll require you to jump through without a government official making a subjective judgment call on your moral character.
This is easily in the running for the worst piece of legislation we’ve ever seen, and we’ve seen a lot of bad legislation. It must be defeated.
