Colorado Republicans are pushing back against Democratic Gov. Jared Polis for signing one of the most extreme anti-gun laws in the country this month, accusing him of turning a constitutional right into a privilege bought with permits and fees.
The law, SB25-003, bans the sale, transfer and manufacture of most semiautomatic firearms unless prospective gun owners obey a range of new requirements, including training mandates, tests and sheriff-issued eligibility cards. Republicans, like state Rep. Ty Winter, say it’s a deliberate effort to choke off lawful gun ownership through bureaucracy and paperwork — a view increasingly shared by Second Amendment organizations now mobilizing to fight the law in court.
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“This bill is putting a paywall in front of a God-given, unalienable right — and that’s the right to self-defense and the right to keep a free nation,” Winter, assistant minority leader in the Colorado House, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Gun rights aren’t a red or blue issue. Gun rights are an American issue. We forget what the Constitution is for — it’s not to go hunting. It’s not to go target shooting. It’s to keep a nation free. It’s to keep a government in check. And I think that’s the first thing our colleagues across the aisle don’t realize.”
Under the new law, Coloradans seeking to buy virtually any semiautomatic firearm with a detachable magazine — most modern guns — must now navigate a three-part gauntlet: completing 12 hours of training, scoring at least 90% on written test and obtaining an eligibility certificate from their county sheriff — none of which will be free.
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Winter says that’s the point.
“First and foremost, it’s the cost,” he said. “They’re increasing every fee in this state … if you’re getting dinked and dunked and nickeled and dimed every time you turn around, and that’s what’s keeping you away from your gun rights — and then you figure, OK, if they can afford the fees, then they have to take off work for the class. Then they have to take the time out of work to go talk to the sheriff. There’s just so many different things that make it hard.”
The bill’s Democratic sponsors, like state Sen. Tom Sullivan, say it’s an “evidence-based” solution to “the public health crisis that is gun violence.” Though Colorado ranks near the middle nationally in overall gun violence rates, the state’s recent history is marred by a grim catalog of mass shootings — Columbine, Aurora and the Boulder supermarket attack — which Democrats routinely invoke to justify broad restrictions on gun ownership.
“High-capacity magazines are what put the ‘mass’ into mass shootings, which is why over a decade ago Colorado Democrats passed legislation to prohibit magazines that hold over 15 rounds of ammunition,” Sullivan said in a statement in support of the bill.
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Winter is skeptical the law has anything to do with public safety.
“They don’t actually want to stop crime,” he said. “I mean, we’re horrible on crime in Colorado. We’re number one in bank robberies. I think we’re number two in auto theft. We’ve got kids overdosing from fentanyl every day, and all they talk about is guns — how guns are a health issue in Colorado. But they don’t ever want to go after criminals. I mean, we had a legislator this year run a bill to stiffen the penalties for child rape, and they killed it in the Judiciary Committee. They want to let people off for everything.”
Colorado Republicans are already laying the groundwork to challenge the law, framing it as a constitutional overreach that can’t survive scrutiny under the Supreme Court’s Bruen standard. That ruling requires gun regulations to be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms law — a bar that the law’s permitting scheme and training mandates fail to meet, according to the Colorado Republican delegation’s letter to the governor.
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State Rep. Max Brooks, a freshman Republican, introduced a resolution urging the state’s Supreme Court to issue an advisory opinion on the law’s constitutionality. In what Winter called the “second step,” Colorado Republicans called on Pam Bondi, the attorney general, to deploy the Justice Department’s newly formed “Second Amendment Enforcement Task Force” against the law before it takes effect in 2026.
But the chances of relief from the state judiciary are remote, Winter said, pointing to the Colorado Supreme Court’s makeup after years of Democratic appointments. With “no hope” the court will intervene, and with state-level remedies already effectively exhausted, the onus falls on outside organizations like Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO) — which called SB25-003 “the most extreme gun control bill in Colorado history” — to wage a more substantive federal courtroom battle. RMGO did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
“Colorado Republicans will not be filing the lawsuit,” Winter said. “But we have been told that, other than the national groups, we also have state gun rights groups that are currently fundraising on behalf of the citizens of Colorado to take this on in the courts … We’re legislators. We’re not attorneys. That’s why we’re going to put it in the hands of the DOJ to try to figure this out, and that’s where we’re going to go from here.”
If the law takes effect as written in 2026, enforcement will largely fall to Colorado’s 64 county sheriffs, some of whom testified against its signing. That raises the likelihood of uneven compliance and enforcement across the state, as it remains unclear whether all sheriffs will enforce a mandate some consider fundamentally unconstitutional.
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With SB25-003 on the books, Colorado now joins California and New York in enacting some of the strictest gun control measures in the country. While those states have faced legal pushback — and partial defeats — under the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, Colorado’s law could be the next major test case for how far blue states can go in regulating the Second Amendment through bureaucracy rather than outright bans.
Winter urged gun rights organizations at every level — from grassroots state groups to national legal foundations — to challenge the law by any means available.
“We are asking anybody, anybody in the gun community who can help us — put this in your article — we need all the help we can get in Colorado. We need all the attention from gun groups, national media to put a stop to the tyrannical overthrow of the Second Amendment in the state of Colorado,” Winter said. “People need to know what’s going on in this state, and how far it’s gone off the rails.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
