DENVER (CN) — With a vote of 19-15 on Friday, the Colorado Senate passed a bill banning firearms with removable magazines, which now heads onto the desk of Democratic Governor Jared Polis.
“Quite frankly this is what our community has been asking us to do for 12 years now and I absolutely believe there are kids that are alive in this state because of the things we do down here,” said Aurora Senator Tom Sullivan, who sponsored the bill, SB25-3, restricting “Semiautomatic Firearms & Rapid-Fire Devices.”
The bill evolved from several years of failed assault rifle bans, with two progressive-backed bills seeking to outright ban assault rifles failing in the last two legislative sessions. The municipalities of Boulder and Louisville have stayed their own attempts to ban the high-capacity firearms within city lines pending federal litigation.
Although the legislation has struggled to take hold in Colorado, nine other states and Washington D.C. have passed semiautomatic weapons sales bans that survived the courts.
With the state’s infamous history of mass shootings spanning from the 1999 attack on Columbine High School in Littleton to the 2021 attack on the Table Mesa King Soopers in Boulder, lawmakers have regularly moved to regulate access to the weapons driving the attacks — from measures limiting high-capacity magazines to raising the age to own a gun to 21 and imposing a three-day waiting period on gun purchases.
“It was at 8:10 when I found out Alex was one of the people murdered by a guy with a high-capacity magazine,” said Sullivan who lost his 27-year-old son in the 2012 Aurora Theater Shooting, 662 Fridays ago by his count.
“We passed legislation in 2014 that limited the capacity of magazines over 15, but in the 10, 12 years since, and it was been woefully inadequate because they were not enforcing it,” Sullivan said, wearing Batman pins and a likeness of Alex on his lapel.
Since 2022, Colorado has experienced 61 mass shootings with 82 killed and 246 injured. On average, the Centennial State loses 1,000 people every year to guns, about two-thirds of which are suicides.
Senate minority leader Paul Lundeen of Colorado Springs opposed the bill as an infringement of Second Amendment rights.
“This bill gets very close to treating the Second Amendment like a hunting license,” Lundeen said. “If we allow the government to redefine rights as privileges then we place ourselves at the mercy of the government.”
Having struggled in past years to define what constitutes an “assault rifle,” Colorado lawmakers settled on targeting “semiautomatic rifle or semiautomatic shotgun with a detachable magazine or a gas-operated semiautomatic handgun with a detachable magazine.” This definition covers many guns sold in the state.
In order to legally obtain a firearm with a detachable magazine, consumers would have to complete a hunter education course, followed up with completion of an extended class within five years of obtaining the gun.
To be eligible for the class, individuals would also have to obtain an eligibility card from their local sheriff’s office following a background check — a hurdle that did not sit right with Senate minority caucus chair Byron Pelton of Sterling, Colorado.
“I’m concerned about having to ask my sheriff if I can buy a gun,” said Pelton as he stood to read aloud the title of amendments added in the house. With many of the amendments pulling funds to support the training program, Pelton cautioned against rolling out a new program in a year where the legislature is scrambling to balance the state budget.
Republican Senator Rod Pelton, whose district spans the eastern plains, predicted that Colorado’s attorney general will be tasked with defending the law all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Violations of the law would be penalized with a class 2 misdemeanor, and subsequent violations charged as a class 6 felony.
If signed, the law would take effect Aug. 1, 2026.
Eileen McCarron, cofounder of the nonprofit Ceasefire Colorado, applauded the bill’s advancement.
“The high-capacity magazines are what put the mass in the mass shooting,” McCarron said. “If a mass shooter ran out of his 15 rounds that are allowed in Colorado, and he wants to quickly get more bullets in, he would have to hand load each individual bullet into the magazine or into the gun.”
Democrats in the Colorado Senate on Tuesday passed two bills restricting firearm access aiming to raise the age to purchase ammunition to 21 and to tighten restrictions on gun shows.
Other gun control bills have fallen short or remain pending. Earlier this month, the House Committee on Finance killed a bipartisan bill that would have provided Coloradans with a $200 income tax credit for purchasing firearm safety devices like gun safes and locks. Also under consideration in the House is a bipartisan bill looking to increase penalties for firearm theft and a Democrat-backed bill to facilitate a voluntary waiver of one’s right to purchase a gun.