A handful of state lawmakers assume the problem with Colorado is that we just aren’t shooting enough at each other.
They mean to fix that during this year’s legislative session.
The usual ammophiliacs under the Gold Dome are back. They’re demanding we make it easier to carry more guns, more hidden guns, bigger guns, hidden guns at school and be able to make it easier to shoot down people that worry us or just plain piss us off.
If you’re from this planet, you know that police and other experts really frown on arming every and any body and sending them off to Black Friday sales at Walmart or crowded high-schools. Unlike in the movies, pistol-packing people pulling out their gats in the high-school lunchroom are more likely to shoot innocent people, or some other fool who just happened to yank out his hog leg and appear to be the bad guy. You can just imagine how worrisome it would be for cops to go rushing into shooting at an elementary school or a grocery store and see a few dozen people with guns drawn.
But these paranoid people believe truly, madly, deeply in the power of Hollywood, which is where too many Americans and state lawmakers get their firearms education.
First up, the usual suspects at the Capitol don’t want to make it just easier to get a permit to carry a gat in your Spanx or back-pack, they want to do away with concealed permits entirely.
Senate Bill 18-97 is sponsored, unsurprisingly, by the likes of GOP Sens. Tim Neville, Randy Baumgardner and Vicki Marble, as well as House Reps. Patrick “Son Of” Neville, and Lori “Yes-That-Lori-Saine” Saine.
Saine is that Wild West maker of laws who accidentally forgot she had a loaded gun in her purse last year when she went to DIA to get on a plane. She argues that we don’t need no stinking concealed gun laws here in Colorado, because people would just have sense enough to handle it.
She, however, is Exhibit “A” as to why only a very, very few people should be permitted to carry hidden weapons. If it were up to me, you’d have to finish military sniper training to get a permit. Everyone else needs to keep their guns and hands where I can see them.
Pretty much the same cast of characters are backing House Bill 18-1015 to repeal Colorado’s gun-magazine law, enacted after the Aurora Theater Shooting. It’s hard to argue that the ban has done much to prevent any mass shootings. It’s much harder to argue that anything good comes from guns that can rapid-fire off 50 rounds in the woods or at a school near you.
Similarly, Club Gat is right behind House Bill 18-1037, which would let adults carry their pocket pieces to school. Easier to pack heat rather than a lunch, I suppose. Think back to your elementary school teachers. Some you liked. Some you didn’t. Would you want any of them reaching for a loaded .38 in their book bag to defend you? High school counselors? Music teachers? I didn’t think so.
The worst of the worst is House Bill 1074, which would allow people to legally shoot each other at work and in their shops and restaurants. This is pretty much an extension of Colorado’s infamous “Make My Day” law, which lets homeowners legally shoot and kill home invaders.
But this bill would let anybody except a customer in an office or a burger-joint to reach for their piece and pop a few off, not just because they broke in, but because they just came into the office or business and made folks uneasy.
The law would let you legally blow away anyone who comes into your liquor store, insurance office or flower shop, as long as you “reasonably” believe that “the other person” — read: unfriendly black or Latino guy — might use “any physical force, no matter how slight.”
No matter how slight.
Big brown dude tosses that dried-up donut on the counter because you won’t go dig out a fresh one?
Bring it, immigrant man: “boom.”
Of course, not being the racist types, bill sponsors like the Neville Bothers and Marble want to make sure you can shoot and kill unsettling white people at work, too. Marble, you’ll recall, earned her Scout badge in racial sensitivity last year when she got all weird about a young Cub Scout pressing her on her infamous fat-minorities-and-fried-chicken flap from a few years earlier.
She has adamantly denied she was being racist by telling committee members in 2013 that Southern cooking tastes good but hefty, unhealthy blacks shouldn’t be eating it, and Latinos need to eat vegetables here like the Mexicans do in Mexico.
I don’t like the idea of giving these people even a live microphone. I sure don’t like the idea of making it easier for them, or those who champion these hair-brained schemes, to get their hands on live rounds.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@AuroraSentinel.com