Analysis: Unpacking Colorado’s New Semi-Auto Ban Bill, Odds of Passage [Member Exclusive]

Unchastened by two latest failed makes an attempt, Colorado lawmakers are again with one other effort to ban AR-15s and different semi-automatic firearms. There’s motive to assume the third time might be the allure.

The Colorado Basic Meeting formally gaveled again in Wednesday for the 2025 legislative session. By the tip of the day, lawmakers had already launched Senate Invoice 25-003. The “Semiautomatic Firearms & Fast-Hearth Gadgets” invoice would criminalize the manufacture, distribution, switch, and buy of any “specified semiautomatic firearm,” outlined as any semiautomatic rifle, shotgun, or gas-operated handgun with a removable journal.

Primarily, the invoice is a reframing of an already novel twist on “assault weapon” ban laws first floated within the US Senate in 2023. The Gasoline-Operated Semiautomatic Firearm Exclusion (GOSAFE) Act, launched by Senators Martin Heinrich (D., N.M.) and Angus King (I., Maine), marked the primary legislative effort to ban semi-automatic firearms with removable magazines whereas selling limited-capacity, fixed-magazine alternate options.

The Senators billed it as a extra critical various to conventional assault weapon bans as a result of it centered on “how these weapons really work” and the options that “make them particularly harmful” as a substitute of “utilizing the looks of those weapons to limit them.” Nevertheless, the language of the proposal targets weapons with all types of actions reasonably than simply gas-operated weapons–regardless of what the identify implies.

Senate Invoice 25-003, in keeping with its legislative textual content and its boosters, takes that idea and reframes it as “enforcement of [Colorado’s] large-capacity journal ban.”

Although it sheds the GOSAFE Act’s moniker, its affect is unmistakable. The handguns coated underneath SB 25-003, for example, are outlined verbatim as they have been underneath the GOSAFE Act. It equally empowers the legal professional normal’s workplace with broad discretion to find out which firearm fashions are banned underneath the measure. SB 25-003 additionally goes after rate-of-fire modifications like bump shares, although it does so in a much less subtle, extra sweeping means than its progenitor.

The banned “rapid-fire units” underneath the invoice would come with any half or mixture of components which have the impact of “rising the speed of fireplace of a semiautomatic firearm above the usual charge of fireplace” for the gun being modified. That would implicate extra anodyne modifications, like precision triggers, alongside machinegun conversion kits.

Consequently, the invoice takes a far broader strategy to outlawing frequent semi-automatic firearms than the standard features-based bans floated and defeated over the past two years. That implies it ought to be sure to have an much more troublesome time making it into regulation than earlier than. But, the posture of this yr’s laws conveys a extra critical and efficient effort is underway.

Whereas two Home backbenchers representing the furthest left flank of the legislature carried the earlier failed Colorado assault weapon ban payments, neither of whom is within the Basic Meeting anymore after profitable major challenges, this yr’s effort carries extra mainstream Democratic help. That features the imprimatur of the occasion’s gun-control coverage heavyweight.

Senator Tom Sullivan, who turned a main determine in Colorado gun politics after he misplaced his son within the 2012 Aurora theater taking pictures, is SB 25-003’s prime sponsor. Notably, Sullivan has cautioned his colleagues in opposition to persevering with to introduce assault weapon laws and informed the Related Press he would have voted in opposition to final yr’s ban invoice had it come up for a Senate vote. 

This time, nonetheless, Sullivan is out entrance on the trouble and is already working to downplay objections to it by trying to create the impression of a extra average strategy.

“We’re not banning any sort of firearm,” Sullivan informed a Denver ABC affiliate. “They’re nonetheless going to have the ability to purchase all the identical sorts of firearms that they have been in a position to purchase earlier than. Simply that, if it takes {a magazine}, the journal have to be hooked up, and the journal can solely be a 15-round.”

That sort of gross sales pitch—suggesting that prohibiting the forms of firearms that folks generally purchase in favor of theoretical choices not at present produced anyplace on the business market isn’t, in some way, a ban—may come throughout as extremely doubtful to gun fans. Nevertheless it seems to be working to shore up help amongst Sullivan’s Democratic colleagues. SB 25-003 was launched with 18 Senate and 24 Home co-sponsors earlier than it had even been scheduled for its first Senate committee listening to.

Whereas it’s not essentially assured that each one unique co-sponsors will keep on board as soon as lobbying and public debate start in earnest, that’s nonetheless a far cry from earlier efforts that struggled to safe even a single Senate sponsor. 18 Senators additionally occur to be the precise quantity wanted to make sure a easy majority vote in Colorado’s 35-member higher home, that means that as issues stand, it has the votes wanted to clear the legislature.

After all, Governor Jared Polis (D.) and his views on the matter stay a serious wild card. To date, his workplace has once more publicly deflected alternatives to supply his ideas on the invoice, a lot as he did when the 2 earlier assault weapon bans have been underneath energetic consideration. He has expressed skepticism of broad gun bans up to now, and he even voiced some tepid reduction on the second assault weapon ban try having failed after the tip of final yr’s legislative session.

“I’ve at all times been skeptical about that sort of measure,” he informed the Denver Gazette‘s editorial board on the time.

It’s onerous to say whether or not or not his calculus has modified with a invoice this yr that imposes a extra sweeping sensible impact however has much less PR baggage than a conventional ban. It’s additionally one factor to specific skepticism of a invoice that didn’t have majority help within the legislature, however it’s fairly one other to publicly buck your occasion with a veto. That issue ought to hassle any gun-rights advocates relying on the Governor to dam its passage.

Finally, the most important hurdle Colorado gun-control advocates face might exist outdoors the state. Although their effort to go a sweeping gun ban has the very best odds of success to this point, their potential triumph arrives at a time when the potential for a Supreme Courtroom AR case hangs overhead just like the Sword of Damocles.

On Friday, the justices held a convention to debate whether or not to take three separate instances concerning state-level bans on semi-automatic rifles and magazines. They might subject orders on the destiny of these instances as quickly as Monday. Snope v. Brown, a kind of instances, represents gun-rights advocates’ greatest candidate but for Supreme Courtroom evaluate of whether or not the Second Modification protects the weapons Colorado lawmakers search to ban.

A Snope cert grant and subsequent Supreme Courtroom ruling hanging down assault weapon bans would nearly definitely scuttle SB 25-003’s try to perform the identical aim by different means.