Three Colorado House Democrats joined with Republican colleagues to block a bill early Thursday that would have banned the sale or purchase of assault weapons in the state, after hours of heated public testimony and a late attempt by the bill’s sponsor to dramatically scale the measure back and salvage its passage.
The House Judiciary Committee’s vote came well past midnight, meaning it fell on the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, and its bipartisan nature comes after lingering internal disagreement among Democratic lawmakers and their leadership over the bill.
Democratic Rep. Elisabeth Epps, HB23-1230’s primary sponsor, twice attempted to amend the measure before the vote and narrow it to a ban on specific equipment, a nod to the entrenched opposition even among her party colleagues on the committee, but the group narrowly rejected those amendments before nixing the bill in its entirety.
Democratic Reps. Said Sharbini, Bob Marshall and Marc Snyder joined with the committee’s four Republican members to reject the full bill. A different Democrat, Rep. Lindsey Daugherty, voted against the amendments, which would’ve significantly changed the bill and allowed for the continued sale of assault weapons; Daugherty then voted for the full bill. Snyder said he believed the bill would take guns away from “law-abiding citizens,” and Marshall said he had promised his constituents that he would not support any new gun reform measures.
Epps said she was “slightly in shock” after the amendments failed, a result that telegraphed the broader bill’s impending defeat, and that mass shootings “are going to go on and on.” Her amendments would’ve banned devices, like bump stocks, that are used to make semi-automatic weapons fire more rapidly. There’s been a federal ban on bump stocks since 2018, though its legitimacy is being challenged in court.
“Banning assault weapons is the relatively low-hanging fruit,” Epps said. “It should be.”
The bill’s failure is one that historic Democratic majorities in the General Assembly will have to explain to their constituents, said Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat. The measure’s been a sensitive topic in the caucus since the session began and its draft language was released — without the sponsors’ knowledge — to a pro-gun group. Epps previously had expressed frustration at the bill’s delayed introduction and to apparent resistance from House leadership in favor of other, less controversial gun reform bills; Marshall praised her for not caving to those who didn’t want the bill brought forward at all.
Still, Democrats on the committee pointed the blame for the bill’s failure squarely upon themselves, given that the party has complete control of state government and a supermajority in the House. Epps had started the day by urging voters to “primary each and every one of us” if the bill failed to pass. Shortly after it didn’t, Democrat Rep. Lorena Garcia, another committee member who voted for the bill, tweeted that Republicans hadn’t killed the bill — “it’s all the Ds.”
“Over this last day and how the bill progressed, I’m deeply concerned about when we had things in our hands, when we the had abilities to make decisions, we did not,” Bacon said during her closing statement before the vote. “And that’s something we’re all going to have to somehow be responsible for. It’s worth saying out loud. Because it was in our hands. It’s OK, everyone has their districts or whatnot, but we’re going to have to answer for this.”
Republicans and opponents to the bill spoke at length Wednesday and laid the blame for the seemingly ceaseless string of mass shootings on a revolving tray of other explanations, from mental health and immorality to unprotected schools and Democratic policies. While Epps and others noted that the common denominator in every mass shooting is a gun, Republicans like Rep. Ryan Armagost said the General Assembly should instead focus on treatment, rather than demonizing guns.
Once the amendments failed, the bill’s fate seemed certain. The committee had heard more than 12 hours of public testimony from supporters and opponents, from survivors of mass shootings and the family members of victims, from gun supporters who promised to sue and sheriffs who urged no votes, from children who accused specific lawmakers of having blood on their hands. One woman held up the clothes her sister was wearing when she was shot at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012.
Republican Rep. Stephanie Luck framed the bill as a “clash of civilizations” between differing constituencies in the state, predicated partially upon differing interpretations of who should be responsible for their own safety and who can restrict constitutional rights.
But Bacon said she worried about a more fundamental question: What are lawmakers — and their constituents — willing to tolerate? Colorado has had three high-profile mass shootings since March 2021, plus the killing of two and an AR-15-wielding gunman in Arvada.
“It breaks my heart that when we have the ability to act, which is the definition of power, we may have resigned ourselves to the same set of circumstances,” Bacon said. “We have to figure out how to talk about this in our communities.”
Pressure has grown on Democratic legislators to address gun violence this session. Students have repeatedly come to the Capitol in recent weeks to plead with lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis to take action. The General Assembly has passed several other gun reform bills already this year, measures that leadership, Polis and the broader caucus had more fully coalesced around.
But some legislators indicated that more should be done. The committee’s chair, Aurora Democratic Rep. Mike Weissman, harkened back to the 2012 theater shooting in his city. He said that even as other gun reform bills have passed, the massacres have continued and that lawmakers needed to revaluate whether the costs associated with bringing and supporting an assault weapons ban still outweighed the benefits.
Several opponents of the bill had said lawmakers should instead focus on mental health. During his closing statement, Armagost, of Berthoud, who wore an assault weapon pin on his lapel, reiterated that position.
“It’s mental illness, it’s mental illness, it’s mental illness,” he said, in response to Epps’s statement, hours before, that the shootings were caused by the availability of powerful semi-automatic firearms like the AR-15.
Democratic supporters of the bill rejected Armagost’s mental health argument.
“I reject the notion that America is simply more deranged than the rest of the world,” said Rep. Steven Woodrow, a Denver Democrat who supported the bill and spoke at length about the history of the Second Amendment. “Everywhere else has mental health crises. You know what they don’t have? Easy access to assault weapons.”
America’s inability to address the problem, he continued, is evidence of “national psychosis” and said lawmakers and the public need not “sit by while children’s faces get blown off.” Referring to several public testifiers who said that lawmakers couldn’t legislate morality, Woodrow said it was fine to accept that evil people exist.
“Fine, some people are evil,” he said. “Stop making it so easy for evil people to butcher us.”
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