Gun Bills: News Miner 49
Also: The left's internal strife, Republican whining, abortion, billionaires, and more.
Summary of Key Gun Bills
I’m leaning on a report from the Firearms Coalition of Colorado for this. Here is a list of the key gun bills winding through the legislature.
SB23-168 would expose gun producers to predatory lawsuits seeking to blame them for the criminal misuse of their products. This is a backdoor effort to ban guns by destroying the industry that makes them. See Dave Kopel’s written testimony.
SB23-169 would increase the age to legally possess a firearm from 18 to 21. Generally I think trying to tier the effective age of adulthood is troublesome. Eighteen-year-old adults can legally get married, have children, sign contracts, etc. Certainly requiring 18-year-olds to register for the draft especially while denying them the rights and privileges of adulthood is grotesquely unjust.
SB23-170 would expand the “red flag” law. I think in principle this is okay, although I have not studied the details of the bill. I think due process should be tightened up regardless.
HB23-1219 would impose waiting periods for a gun purchase. I think problems of crime and suicide should be handled directly, not by legally harassing the vast majority of gun owners (and would-be gun owners) who have violated no one’s rights and who are not suicidal. If the bill goes through, I think it should at least be amended to require the state to pay for 24/7 police protection for any individual who requests it while denied the right to purchase a gun.
HB23-1219 would ban arbitrarily defined “assault” guns. That’s generally a stupid idea for reasons I’ve discussed.
The Left Eats Its Own
Pointing out that Republicans are great at forming circular firing squads is now cliché. Interestingly, now that leftist progressives have nearly all the political power in the state, things have gotten a little testy within that camp as well.
I was surprised that the Colorado Sun published Trish Zornio’s personal attack on Rep. Elisabeth Epps. No one who follows Epps on Twitter can help but notice that she can tend to be a bit “prickly,” but why that deserved an entire column I’m not sure.
Epps said of Zornio, presumably referring to Zornio’s primary loss for U.S. Senate, “We rejected her white liberal virtue-signaling.” Epps also reproduced her 2021 comments about Zornio, who wrote for Colorado Newsline at the time: “Dear [Newsline]—at the top of the list of opinions that we don’t need to be published = performative allyship by people like Trish Zornio. She needs to keep our movement out of her oh so ‘progressive’ mouth.” Ouch. (I’m not sure exactly what that was about.)
The Epps-Zornio spat is largely soap-opera drama. The attacks on Leslie Herod by other progressives are more significant.
On March 17, the Denver Post published an op-ed by Wanda James that harshly condemns the attacks on Herod along with related news stories from Axios and Denverite. James writes:
Progressive women of color face an institutionalized double standard normalized by journalists who write “bad boss” hit pieces like these. It creates a climate I have been all too familiar with throughout my life. It must end, but it will not if journalists ignore the racial disparity in their writing. Journalists who fail to understand this worldview are lured in by unhinged social media posts that aid and abet these caricatures, false stereotypes, and tropes meant to demean and put women in their place. . . .
The “angry Black woman” trope is rooted in a long history of racism that continues to infect our highest institutions to this day. Any driven, passionate Black woman who pushes herself and her staff to achieve results is subject to increased scrutiny and criticism compared to that of her white counterparts, especially when compared to her white male counterparts.
Quick Takes
Pinball: See my review of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game over at Self in Society. I loved this movie! I also discuss aspects of pinball in Colorado.
Republican Whiners: Heidi Ganahl has a new online show. Why anyone thought this was a good idea I don’t know. Characteristically, Gahanl, who ran one of the worst high-level campaigns in state history, blamed “a feckless group of power players, consultants, and pundits that have caused us to lose for years.” It couldn’t possibly be that many Republicans are crazy conspiratorial jerks that turns off voters.
Abortion: Jon Caldara points out that, by forcing insurance to pay for abortion, the legislature would in effect make people who think abortion is murder help to finance it, through their insurance premiums. Krista Kafer, who opposes abortion, writes, “If the bill passes I’ll leave my health insurance and join a share bills org. I already pay for birth control through my fed taxes. I won’t pay for death of babies.” I don’t have to agree with Kafer’s stance to recognize this as a freedom of conscience issue.
Abortion II: Bill 190 seeks to end “deceptive actions regarding pregnancy-related services.” I was worried that it might restrict freedom of speech. But offhand I don’t see any problems with the text as drafted. My main question is this: Don’t the existing laws against fraud already cover this sort of thing? If so, I’d oppose the bill just on grounds that we should keep the statutes as short as feasible. If not, I’d suggest tweaking the existing laws on fraud in a minimalist way.
Insurance: Speaking of health insurance, it’s so weird how price controls aren’t working as intended.
Speech: The National Lawyers Guild and the Black Law Students’ Association complained about Ila Shapiro speaking at the University of Denver. Whaaaa.
Litigation: Bill 1032 would create “a six-figure incentive to litigate accessibility problems rather than resolve them,” Mark Hillman writes.
Reparations: Lauren Boebert was wrong to imply that slavery did not exist in California. But she’s right that paying millions of dollars to every Black person in reparations is not realistic.
Guns: Here is how Republican Rep. Scott Bottoms characterized the gun debate, paraphrasing a Democratic colleague: “She says, ‘You’ve got your side, it’s the Constitution. But we’ve got real live people on our side.’ And we’re like, ‘We don’t care.’” That’s not how to effectively lay out your position!
Taxes: One activist declared, “Colorado has 12 billionaires living in the state. Doesn’t have a progressive income tax, doesn’t tax wealth, bottom 5 state in property tax rate. We could solve our distributional problems, with a little(lot) of redistribution.” This was retweeted by a state legislator. I replied facetiously, “Yeah thank goodness it’s illegal for billionaires to move to other states.”
Crime: Maybe if police would do their jobs and put a stop to the wave of car thefts in Colorado, people wouldn’t get into deadly confrontations over stolen cars. That said, if someone steals your car, unless there is a child inside or something, do not pursue! A car isn’t worth someone’s life or health.
Criminal Justice: Elisabeth Epps reports that the house passed Bill 1151 to create “48-hour bond hearings [that] facilitate fairness and freedom.” The bill tightens up existing law; I’m not sure of the details.
Exposure: The Gazette has out an op-ed urging felony penalties for exposure of genitals to children. My take: It’s ok to increase criminal penalties for publicly exposing yourself to children “with sexual intent.” My worry: What about the dude just taking a pee in a park? “Intent” is in the mind and enforcement is easily abused by cops and prosecutors.
Campaign Finance: Rob Natelson rightly complains about campaign laws that “largely blocked donations from traditional bases of conservative support” while allowing unlimited spending by other groups. My take: The campaign laws intended to get big money out of elections only made matters worse.
Child Care: Jake Posik of the Maine Policy Center said, “As special interests have come in to regulate child care under the subjective terms of quality, more and more availability has disappeared, and moved away from family child care, to child care centers.” My concern is that Colorado governments too have largely driven private providers of child care from the market.
Image: Frédéric Bisson