Teddy Collins moved his young family to Colorado Springs from Texas in 2017, lured by its safety, its reputation as an excellent place to live and its well-known conservative disposition. He also arrived with a plan: He would open a gun store in the city.
Sure, he thought, Colorado had enacted a 15-round limit on firearm magazines earlier that decade, in response to the 2012 Aurora movie theater massacre. But the state otherwise was known at the time for its swing-state purple politics and gun laws that were not otherwise far out of step with the rest of the Mountain West.
As he settled into his new home, however — and before he could open his store — a raft of soon-to-be lawmakers with more ambitious gun-regulation agendas were launching campaigns across the state. The Democrats would take full control of state government in the 2018 blue wave election, and their legislative majorities would go on to pass a slate of laws over the next seven years that established sweeping new standards for gun sales and ownership.
“At that time, we still had the 15-round magazine capacity limit, but we did not have three-day waits — we did not have all this other bureaucratic stuff,” Collins said. “We did not have restrictions on licenses like we see now. We didn’t have SB-3. We didn’t have an excise tax.
“Over the years, just slowly, slowly, Colorado has gone the way — and I fear we’re going the way — of California.”
The sweep of new laws started relatively slowly, with 2019’s extreme risk protection order law. But the pace of new restrictions has picked up unmistakably since then, with lawmakers putting stricter and broader rules on nearly all facets of firearms. Those efforts culminated this spring with the passage of Senate Bill 3 — a law that, when it goes into effect in August 2026, will restrict the sale of many semiautomatic firearms that have detachable magazines unless the buyer has passed a safety course.
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.
Where detractors of all the Democrats’ legislation see an ever-growing list of demands on gun ownership that is eroding their fundamental freedoms, supporters see requirements aimed at fostering responsible gun ownership and rules that put a premium on gun safety.
They have been motivated to tighten gun laws, they say, by the too-common mass shootings and rising routine gun violence that included 943 firearm deaths in Colorado, largely from suicides and homicides, in 2023.
“I’m so 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,” said House Majority Leader Monica Duran, a Wheat Ridge Democrat and sponsor of nearly a third of the new gun laws. “We’ve come a long way.”
But Collins, the gun store owner, says he feels like the rug was pulled out from under him after he opened Spartan Defense in 2021. The opening came after he’d weathered pandemic delays — and right as some of the most notable legislation was being passed.
With hindsight, he’s not sure he would have invested in the Colorado Springs store.
“When I got here, business was great,” Collins said. “And now, they’re just trying to put up all these barriers and roadblocks and red tape.”
‘Some of the strictest’ laws
The Colorado laws passed over the last six years have had a significant real-world effect.
Customers who buy a gun must now wait three days to pick it up. They must pass more stringent background checks, both from the state and the federal government. They must be at least 21 years old to buy any type of gun or ammunition. They cannot have been convicted of a slew of crimes, including any type of assault, a bias-motivated crime, cruelty to animals or harassment.
They must pay a new 6.5% excise tax, which totals $65 on a $1,000 purchase, to generate money for services for crime victims and mental health as well as school safety.
Once a gun is purchased, the owner must store it securely enough that children and people who are ineligible to possess firearms can’t access it. If they keep the gun in a car, they must meet secure storage requirements. Failing to do either can result in a misdemeanor charge.
The owner can’t carry a gun at a polling place or inside government buildings and educational facilities, such as schools and day care centers. If the owner wants to carry the gun concealed, they must pay for and pass an eight-hour course that includes live-fire exercises and a written exam. A refresher course, required every five years for people who already have permits, is two hours and also includes an exam and a live-fire exercise.
And if the person is deemed a threat to themselves or others, their guns can be confiscated.
“The Colorado state legislature has been very busy on the gun front over the past half-dozen years or so,” said Kristin Goss, a Duke University public policy professor who studies gun politics. “Colorado is now pretty comparable to some of the strictest gun law states in the country.”
Duran rejected the suggestion that any of those laws infringe on individual rights. As a concealed-carry permit holder herself, she said it’s her “duty” as a lawmaker and a gun owner to show what responsible ownership looks like.
“I don’t ever feel like anything that I have supported or run is an infringement on my rights as a gun owner,” Duran said. “I feel like it’s part of my responsibility as a gun owner to make sure that I pass legislation and support things that make our community safer.”

Gov. Jared Polis is “proud” of the gun laws and has called the state a “model for common-sense reform,” his spokesperson, Shelby Wieman, said.
In the first six months of this year alone, more than 2,000 firearm transactions were denied through background checks, for reasons that include past assault convictions, restraining orders, traffic offenses and more, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
“The laws Gov. Polis has signed promote responsible gun ownership, respect Second Amendment rights, give more tools to law enforcement, help to get illegal firearms off our streets, and have undoubtedly made our state more safe,” Wieman wrote in a statement to The Denver Post. “These measures, along with many others, have helped reduce crime rates in our communities and we look forward to ensuring those trends continue.”
Polis was elected governor as part of the 2018 wave. But he’s also shown more restraint than some Democrats when it comes to firearm laws. He balked at an initial version of SB-3 this year that would have outright banned the sale of semiautomatic weapons that have detachable magazines. His office negotiated the allowance for prospective buyers to take training courses.
‘More and more restrictive’
The view from reform advocates that the laws enforce responsible gun ownership clashes against that of gun-rights advocates, who see the flurry of legislation as a fast-and-furious construction of new barriers to legal gun ownership.
Most gun owners want to comply with the law, said Ray Elliott, the president of the Colorado State Shooting Association. Gun locks, training, waiting periods and the new excise tax each add barriers — whether it’s cost or time — to gun ownership.
“All those rules and laws and everything going on make (gun ownership) more and more onerous, more and more restrictive,” Elliott said. “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.”

His view is shared by Collins, the gun store owner, who’s also the vice president of the Colorado Federal Firearms Licensee Association. On a recent weekday afternoon, a clerk at his store was walking a potential customer through rules for transferring firearms and how to comply with the law. Collins said training is constant to keep clerks abreast of changes in law and new guidance as the store tries to stay on the right side of new regulations.
The new excise tax, in particular, has been a problem, Collins said. He called the law vague in defining which gun parts and accessories the tax applies to, putting him at risk of either overcharging customers or undercollecting the tax. The tax is also driving some customers out of state for certain items because they find them cheaper to buy online and pay a fee needed to transfer possession of the gun.
State Sen. Byron Pelton, a Sterling Republican, said he sees that problem acutely.
His sprawling northeastern Colorado district touches three other states: Nebraska, Kansas and Wyoming. All have distinctly more lenient firearm laws than Colorado. Consituents will cross the border for ammunition, in particular, to avoid the added cost of the excise tax.
“The state of Colorado is forcing more people to go out of state to buy guns, because the laws are so draconian,” Pelton said. “It’s making it harder and harder and more expensive for folks in rural Colorado to buy firearms to protect themselves and their land and their livestock.”
Elliott didn’t doubt that many who support the recent gun laws were sincere in trying to make people safer. But he also sees an overall movement toward disarmament. He called it “a death by a thousand cuts.”
His group sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this year highlighting the laws they find most detestable. The letter was signed by elected Republican officials across the state.
Collins’ business does offer firearm training — he said he’s trained more than 15,000 students — but he argues it should be optional. Making it a requirement infringes on gun owners’ rights under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, he said.
Collins estimates that SB-3, when it goes into effect, will impact nearly 80% of his inventory, including AR-15-type rifles — one of the most popular styles of sport-shooting rifles in the country. The weapon is also commonly associated with some of the worst mass shootings in the country, including in Colorado, though handguns are more frequently used for such attacks.
“I do see people that will want to exercise their rights and are going to stay here in Colorado,” Collins said. “I do see people that are just not going to put up with it.”

As the new limit on semiautomatic sales nears a year from now, barring any successful lawsuits to prevent it, “I don’t expect anything to be left on my shelves,” Collins said. He expects a surge in sales similar to ones he recalls during the COVID-19 pandemic, before he opened his brick-and-mortar store, and after President Barack Obama was elected, which prompted worries by some people about national restrictions on guns and ammo.
Collins is cautious about how he’ll restock as the new law goes into effect. He doesn’t want to get left with inventory he can’t sell.
But advocates and the gun industry have long predicted doom because of new gun laws, said Sen. Tom Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat and a sponsor of many of Colorado’s new gun laws, and “none of that is true.” Sullivan’s son, Alex, was one of a dozen people murdered in the Aurora theater shooting. Seventy others were injured.
Alex’s murder spurred Sullivan to advocate for stricter gun laws in Colorado and nationally, and led to him running for office.
SB-3 does prohibit the sale of many semiautomatic weapons — unless the purchaser has completed a firearm education course. The bill was heavily amended while it made its way through the legislature and Sullivan now describes it as a “permit-to-purchase” law.
People who follow the law haven’t lost access to anything in recent years — and won’t under this law, Sullivan said. But laws need to change as society changes, he said. Sullivan likened the new gun laws to the shift toward widespread adoption of seatbelts in cars a few generations ago. It didn’t happen overnight, but the life-saving devices are now the norm.
“OK, you’ve got to wait a few days to get (a gun). Or you have to fill out another form. Whatever it is, you still get what you want,” Sullivan said.

But do the laws work?
One of the 2021 gun laws championed by 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.
Gun-rights advocates are quick to point to such numbers, as well as the overall pandemic-era spike in violent crime, as evidence that the laws are, at best, misguided. At worst, they see the crime and violence being used as a cover to disarm law-abiding citizens.
“I don’t think it’s true that every single law that was passed was necessarily pointless and useless. Many are, but not all,” said David B. Kopel, the research director of the Independence Institute, a libertarian-conservative think tank in Denver. He’s also a senior fellow at the Firearms Research Center in the University of Wyoming’s College of Law.
He said some laws have a reasonable premise, even if the data itself or their implementation leaves an open question about their efficacy and overall consequences.
The gun issue is also so fraught and caught up in the culture wars that Kopel sees “a tremendous amount of motivated reasoning, on both sides,” as those arguing seek to confirm preexisting beliefs.
Gauging the effectiveness of laws means disentangling them from broader societal changes and weighing them against the costs they impose on other people. The waiting period law, for example, may stop some suicides, but it also “makes society more dangerous,” he argues, because people can’t defend themselves.
Goss, the Duke University professor, likewise points out the lack of good, specific evidence on the effects of new laws on gun violence. Regional differences in history, culture and society can lead to the same laws having different effects.
But the field of study is starting to change. The Rand Corporation recently published a review of studies on gun violence that, while not drawing firm conclusions, highlighted the strength of evidence for certain laws. Broadly, the review shows that stricter laws may decrease gun violence — but it also finds hard evidence of that may be slim. Its review of studies on waiting periods, for example, found “moderate” evidence that the laws had helped minimize suicide and violent crime.
“There’s pretty suggestive evidence that at the aggregate level, if you have a good set of laws and they’re enforced, there will be a reduction in people misusing firearms,” Goss said. “But we need much better research on that.”

Gun-rights advocates argue that root causes, not guns, should be the focus. If legislators want to address suicide, they should push for programs to support mental health; if it’s crime, go after criminals.
“Criminals, they’re just going to have a little bit further to drive in order to get a firearm that they want to use in a bad way,” Collins said. He added that high-end precision weapons from stores like his aren’t usually the weapons used in violence. It’s cheap, stolen firearms.
He also cited the June 1 attack on demonstrators in Boulder as evidence that people intent on harming others will find a way. Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the man accused of carrying out the attack with homemade firebombs, wounded more than a dozen people, including a woman who died later. He is an immigrant who was denied a gun purchase earlier in the year because he lacked proper legal status.
Duran and Sullivan both pointed out that the pandemic upended society both in terms of crime statistics and gun sales. Wieman, the governor’s spokesperson, noted that violent crime and property crime both dropped by more than 13% between 2022 and 2024.
Duran says those numbers and other data are worth reexamining to determine what more needs to be done regarding gun safety and new laws.
She also remains confident that the laws have had a positive effect. In her view, even one life saved because of the laws still matters.
“There isn’t a magic wand out there,” Duran said. “There just isn’t. What it takes is combining neighborhoods and community with the advocates and the experts — all of us together to say, ‘What does the data show us and what do we need to do next to make a difference?’ “

Colorado’s undeniable shift
Twelve years ago, in the wake of the Aurora shooting, it wasn’t clear if Colorado would continue to stiffen its gun laws or not.
Rhonda Fields, who sponsored the magazine limit law in 2013 and is now an Arapahoe County commissioner, said the gun laws passed that year “created shockwaves across the state.” The package also included a law requiring universal background checks and a fee to cover those checks.
Lawmakers faced recalls and threats, including by one man who was arrested for sending Fields harassing messages. Democrats lost control of the state Senate and at least one company, firearm magazine manufacturer Magpul, left the state in protest.
Democrats spent the next several years playing defense, said Sullivan, who was not a legislator then. The state had followed a similar pattern after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre: An unbearable tragedy led to a burst of energy around firearm laws, and then quiet.
The impasse on legislation started to break in 2018, along with Colorado’s purple reputation. Duran, like Sullivan, was part of a wave of incoming Democrats who won office that year to take control of state government.
She recalled walking into the Capitol intent on creating new requirements for concealed-carry laws — and being told no by Democratic leadership. They already had plans for a new gun bill in the 2019 session, and they wouldn’t wager majority control more than that, Duran said.
That bill was the now-enacted red-flag law. Despite protests over it, Democrats would go on to keep their majorities in the 2020 election. And in the 2022 election. And in 2024.
Backers of stricter gun laws took it as a sign that the people wanted reform.
“You can’t talk about the national gun safety movement without talking about Colorado,” Everytown for Gun Safety President John Feinblatt said. “A decade ago, no one saw progress like this coming from a state known for hunting and sport shooting.”
His group ranks states based on how it rates the relative strength of their gun laws.
“Colorado has the 10th-strongest gun laws in the country,” Feinblatt said, “and its lawmakers aren’t just running on gun safety — they’re winning.”
But everyday gun owners end up bearing the brunt of the new laws, said Elliott, from the shooting association.
“Responsible gun owners are not the problem,” Elliott said. “(The state is) literally passing laws on people that are very, very law-abiding citizens.”
Among current and former lawmakers, Fields, whose son was murdered in a shooting in 2005, said it’s “amazing” how far the state has come; she left the legislature after she was term-limited from running again in 2024. Sullivan, likewise, said he “can’t overemphasize the thankfulness” he and others in the community of people affected by gun violence feel for the new laws Colorado has passed.
But he also called for another shift in thinking. He pointed out that education, climate change, the budget and other key state priorities all have periodic check-ins to see how those laws are working. Why not gun laws?
He’s asked legislative staff to seek more information on firearm thefts to see if policy can be tailored to the problem. Rafts of thefts from cars, homes or stores could all need different solutions. He also questioned why laws against attempts to make unlawful purchases of firearms weren’t used against the alleged Boulder firebomber.
Large Democratic majorities make it relatively easy to pass splashy gun legislation and for his colleagues to collect bill signing pens, Sullivan said, but that doesn’t replace the day-to-day policy work.
He also acknowledged that his circumstances are different from others’ in the legislature.
“Everyone else has the opportunity to move on from what happened on July 20,” Sullivan said, referring to the date of the Aurora theater massacre. “They get to remember the tragedy and put it back on a shelf, and then wait another year to remember it again. For me, it’s there every single day. It changes you. It gives you a different perspective on things.”
Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.