I'm not surprised to see the Denver Post come out against the DOJ's new lawsuit taking on the city's "assault weapon" ban. I'd be shocked if the paper's liberal editorial board didn't bash the attempt to undo the gun ban in court. But the arguments deployed by the editors of the Post are downright idiotic, and ultimately contradictory as well.
To bolster their case for the ban on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms, the Post doesn't cite the Constitution or argue that there's any kind of historical tradition that would allow for the city's prohibitions. Instead, they point to the 2025 shooting spree at Evergreen High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, where a teen stole a revolver from his parents and injured two students before taking his own life.
According to investigators, the shooter fired about 20 rounds over the course of nine minutes. According to the Post editors, "we can tell the shooter used his bullets sparingly despite having extra ammunition with him, and that reloading bought time for students and teachers to run, hide, and warn others."
All this time, the assailant was limited by his gun’s capacity and the slower rate at which it could fire compared to an assault rifle. Lives were saved because the shooter was only able to take a revolver from his parents’ gun safe. It’s unclear what other weapons were in the safe because the would-be killer’s parents refused to speak to police in the days, weeks and months following the attack.
A couple of points here: first, if the shooter "used his bullets sparingly despite having extra ammunition with him," then how can we be so sure that wouldn't have also been the case if he'd been armed with a semi-automatic rifle? Based on the investigation conducted by law enforcement, it sounds like the suspect was being very deliberate in his targets (and happened to be a pretty bad shot). Carrying a handgun, not a rifle, may actually have allowed him to get closer to his intended victims because he was able to hide the revolver until he was near them.
We also don't know that the suspect "was only able" to take a revolver from his parents' gun safe. I'd argue that was almost certainly not the case, given that most gun owners don't have additional layers of security for certain firearms that are locked away in safe. It's more likely that the suspect chose to use a revolver, again because of its concealability, though as the editors reluctantly say, we don't know what other options he had available to him once he was able to gain access to the safe.
The idea that every law-abiding Denver resident should be prohibited from possessing the most popular rifle in America because some murderous idiot used a revolver in a school shooting is just plain dumb. Using that logic, I'm guessing the paper's editors would be equally okay if Denver banned semi-automatic firearms altogether, even if that turned the vast majority of the city's gun owners into criminals.
The cherry on top of this idiot sundae, though, comes when the editors offer their opinion about what the DOJ should be doing instead of suing Denver over its gun ban.
If the U.S. Department of Justice wants to protect the Second Amendment, then it would best serve law-abiding, patriotic gun owners by aggressively rooting out the extremist pockets of activity that are fueling mass shootings. The attacker at Evergreen High School was inspired by a radical misogynist movement online that glorified the Isla Vista, Calif., shooter who went on a killing spree because he was angry at women, because he had not had sex, and called himself involuntarily celibate.
The FBI was tracking the Evergreen shooter’s online activity. Federal law enforcement said they were working to identify the anonymous user when the shooting occurred. The DOJ should be spending its time building cases against known threats, so it can move quickly with warrants when intelligence indicates an imminent attack.
At least on some level, the editors of the Post seem to understand that the real threat is the person intent on committing an act of mass violence, not whatever tool they decide to use. If the suspect had stolen his parents' car and used it to run down students in a parking lot, would the paper be demanding a ban on "high powered sports cars" and heavy pickups? I highly doubt it.
The DOJ is big enough to do more than one thing at a time. It can build cases against known threats while also taking on laws and ordinances that pose a threat to our civil rights. If the Denver Post wants to argue that the DOJ and FBI should be aggressively investigating the warped subculture that celebrates mass shootings, I'd largely agree. But those agencies can do that while also respecting we the people's right to keep and bear arms, and that is exactly what the lawsuit taking on Denver's "assault weapons" ban is all about.
