Time’s up for Colorado’s outrageous gun-rights activists.
State lawmakers, unlike those in Congress, are finally moving ahead to do something meaningful to help stem the endless river of people killed by gun violence.
Colorado will finally have a so-called red-flag or extreme risk protection order law to help get guns away from mentally ill people so they don’t kill themselves or others.
Regardless of what misguided or misled state Republican leaders say on the matter, the measure is fair, and it’s desperately needed.
Colorado has a too-long history of innocent people being murdered by mentally ill people who were able to get and keep guns because of the handiwork of gun-rights zealots like the National Rifle Association and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.
These groups and their political lackeys in the Colorado Legislature and Congress have for too long prevented real and meaningful gun control from taking effect.
No more. Colorado voters swept enough of these cruel, ignorant or banal obstructionists out of the way to allow for action.
Empowered Democrats can now make law what a majority of Colorado residents, police, sheriffs, prosecutors and deputies have repeatedly said they want: laws that allow cops to get guns away from mentally unstable people.
Pay no attention to the embarrassing tantrums being thrown by elected and citizen gun-nuts spewing pure fiction about this measure bypassing due process for gun owners.
It’s a lie.
The measure allows neighbors, family members or police to go to a judge and tell them that they think Dad, Mr. Smith or your kid’s teacher gives every indication that he’s really got psychiatric problems and a loaded gun or arsenal.
You or the cops have to persuade a judge of two things: Dad’s really acting crazy, and he really has guns.
If this had happened with Aurora theater shooter James Holmes, or the murderer of Douglas County Sheriff Deputy Zackari Parrish, Matthew Riehl, those who clearly knew these men were dangerous and armed could have prevented murders. They could have contacted cops, who could have gone to courts and gotten these notorious murderers away from their guns and eventual victims.
A red-flag law could have made it so that state Rep. Tom Sullivan of Centennial was just another retired Postal Service employee and not the leading force in the Legislature to get House Bill 1177 passed.
His son, Alex, was among those murdered in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting. Sullivan wears Alex’s jacket every day to the Capitol and is hellbent on finally getting a law to prevent other parents from suffering his own fate.
“Watching your child’s body drop into the ground is as bad as it gets,” referring to Alex’s funeral after he was murdered during the shooting.
It’s not so bad, however, that legislators like GOP state Rep. Patrick Neville, now state House minority leader, says the bill is wrong because it doesn’t protect the gun rights of owners.
He’s right that this measure, by design, usurps the gun rights of a mentally ill person and takes their goddam guns away before they kill themselves or others.
He and others are wrong, though, in saying it’s just a gun-grabbing free-for-all.
There’s due process here in that once cops separate guns from unstable owners, the accused has every opportunity to persuade the judge that the removal was unjust and unneeded.
It makes no sense, none, that cops would go tap-tapping on the door of a mentally ill guy or woman with an arsenal in their basement and say, “Hey, your neighbors think your crazy as all hell and don’t like that you have an AR-15 inside. OK if you come to court in a few days and tell the judge it’s all cool?”
No.
Cops know what’s what, and they know they want this bill to keep mentally ill gun owners from killing cops or others when it all goes off the rails. And here in Aurora and across the state, we all know all too well, it’s going to go off the rails again.
Clearly, what these gun nuts are worried about is scrutiny of their own mental stability in light of what many of them say and do, especially on social media. If you threaten on Twitter to kill a cop who tries to take away your .22 rifle or semi-automatic assault rifle and 18 cases of ammo, how stable are you? If you call up journalists who about gun control and leave freaking voice mail messages saying that, “I’m going to get you, bitch,” like so many of us have, how mentally fit are you to keep guns and ammo?
Tell it to the judge.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter or Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com