EDITORIAL: Another reason for Polis to veto gun control

The ruling Democrats in Colorado’s Legislature long have been blind to the irrelevance of gun control in fighting gun violence. Their successive attempts at legislating ever more restrictions on gun ownership reflect that, backfiring on law-abiding citizens while having no impact on our state’s alarming crime rate.

Hence, legislative Democrats’ latest shot in the dark on the subject. Senate Bill 25-003 is a sweeping ban on most semiautomatic firearms, which is to say most firearms in general. It includes many if not most workaday hunting rifles and shotguns.

Now pending in the state House, it’s a wild overreach — likely unconstitutional — and once again will prove pointless in stemming crimes committed with guns.

Gov. Jared Polis, said to have an eye on the White House, has been characteristically coy about the bill. He’s a Boulder Democrat with “progressive” bona fides yet doesn’t want to appear as a gun grabber to centrist voters in Middle America.

Polis gave a cold shoulder to previous attempts by his party comrades to ban “assault rifles” and even seemed to have indigestion over earlier versions of the current bill. But he may feel a recent amendment to the measure could afford him an escape clause so he can sign it.

He would be wrong.

The amendment would let Coloradans who take a hunter-safety training course and firearm-safety training buy or sell semiautomatic rifles, shotguns, or handguns with detachable magazines. It would add an absurdly convoluted, costly and time-consuming complication to buying or selling a gun. And our guess is even the bill’s authors have no idea how it actually would work. And, given how the process is so onerous it likely would thwart legal gun sales by bureaucratizing them, it’s no surprise right-to-arms advocacy groups still oppose the bill.

Add to that the distinct possibility courts will find even the amended version of SB 25-003 an unreasonable restraint on Coloradans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and it still could be radioactive for Polis’ presidential aspirations. That’s not to mention it will do nothing whatsoever to aid the crime fight, which in itself is reason enough for Polis to veto it.

It also turns out there’s another problematic feature of the legislation as it now stands. Lawmakers are trying to hustle it through the process without funding its enforcement and implementation out of the state’s overspent budget — instead making the self-funded Colorado Parks and Wildlife division pick up the tab. In other words, the many Coloradans who sustain the division through fees they pay for state parks passes, campsite rentals, hunting and fishing licenses and the like would have to subsidize a dubious new dose of gun control.

In case the bill’s legislative backers care — though they probably don’t — Parks and Wildlife already has its hands full. Among other considerations, its funds have been severely strained, in part due to the fiasco of implementing the state’s misguided wolf introduction program and compensating cattle ranchers whose herds are being decimated.

The free-spending lawmakers supporting this measure — including its sponsors, Sens. Tom Sullivan, D-Centennial, and Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, and Reps. Andrew Boesenecker, D-Fort Collins, and Meg Froelich, D-Englewood — don’t seem to care about its fiscal irresponsibility. Nor do they seem to care if it faces constitutional hurdles — notwithstanding Boesenecker’s claims similar measures have withstood court challenges elsewhere.

Most maddeningly, none seems to care that it will have no effect — none — on gun violence. Just like all the other gun-control measures imposed on the law abiding.

All in all, three good reasons for Polis to veto the measure.