Anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg is spending $1-million on ads in Colorado attacking Republican Senator Cory Gardner for “standing with the gun lobby” and opposing “common sense gun safety measures,” but what the anti-gun group isn’t telling voters is that the very gun control laws that they’re demanding at the federal level have been in place in Colorado for years, yet violent crime has increased dramatically since the laws took effect.

Bloomberg’s gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety is backing former governor John Hickenlooper in his bid to unseat Gardner, and they’ve lavished praise on the Democrat for signing gun control laws like a magazine ban and universal background checks “before it was politically expedient.” Hickenlooper approved the gun control bills in 2013, but several months after he signed the bills into law, the governor actually apologized to county sheriffs for not seeking their input before the bills came to his desk.

What’s more, Hickenlooper also claimed that he “would have thought twice” about signing the bills if he’d realized how controversial they would be, and acknowledged that the magazine ban is largely unenforceable.

Of course, none of that history appears in the new Everytown ad, which claims that Cory Gardner is blocking “common sense gun safety bills” like the ones Hickenlooper signed as governor.

Unfortunately for Bloomberg, Hickenlooper, and gun control activists in Colorado, the fact is that these measures don’t involve much common sense and they certainly haven’t made the state a safer place. While the violent crime rate was declining nationwide, it increased by 25% in Colorado between 2013 and 2017, and has grown even higher in recent years. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged that violent crime in 2018 was nearly 8% higher than 2017, and after a small decrease in the statewide violent crime rate in 2019, violence is once again on the rise.

In Denver, the numbers are even worse. Violent crime has increased every year since Hickenlooper signed his gun control bills into law, and 2020 is on pace to be the deadliest year in at least a decade. In 2019 there were 67 homicides in Denver. So far in 2020 there’ve already been 65, and we still have three more months to go.

If Everytown’s gun control bills were really based on common sense and actually made people safer, we’d see some evidence of that over the past seven years in the state of Colorado. Instead, Coloradans are less safe and less free, and Americans can expect the same results if Bloomberg succeeds in turning the U.S. Senate blue on Election Day in November.