Colorado's new "permit to purchase" law that will cover the sale of almost every centerfire semi-automatic rifle on the market doesn't officially kick in until Saturday. But with the state's 3-day waiting period, anyone who wanted to pick up their gun before the law takes effect had to pay for that firearm by Tuesday, July 28.
Just as we saw in Virginia ahead of the "assault firearm" ban that took effect on July 1 before it was halted by a statewide injunction, Colorado gun stores have been swamped with customers looking to buy before their Second Amendment rights are subject to new infringements.
“We are jam-packed,” Justin Green, owner of SDS Guns in Colorado Springs, said last week, as people streamed in and out of the shop at Palmer Park and Academy boulevards.
He doesn’t usually work the sales floor. But during July, normally a slow month, Coloradans realized enactment of a law passed in April 2025 was bearing down. So that’s where Green spent his days, instead of fishing in his new boat or camping in his new fifth-wheel.
Business was so brisk that “all my bills are paid,” Green said, adding that he’s run out of inventory and restocked three times in recent months.
Green called the new law a "show of fecal matter", and I won't try to dispute that characterization. The "permit-to-purchase" law started out as an outright ban on so-called assault weapons, but Gov. Jared Polis signaled that he wouldn't sign that language into law, so Democrats in Denver adopted their fallback plan. If they can't ban the sale of these guns outright, then they'll make it a time-consuming and expensive process to purchase and possess one.
In order to get a permit to purchase a "specified semiautomatic firearm", you must first take a mandatory training class. Anyone who's taken an approved hunter safety course within the previous five years must go through an additional 4-hour course, while those who haven't had hunter ed will be forced to take a 12-hour training course.
Only after you have your certificate of completion in hand can you go down to your local sheriff's office and fill out the application for a Firearms Safety Course Eligibility Card, which allows you to purchase some of the most popular firearms in the country after undergoing another background check at the gun shop and waiting the three days mandated under state law.
The 12-hour training will cost $500, said Roy L. Bartlette Jr., who has lived in Teller County for 10 years.
The former military gunner who did two tours in Iraq showed up at Freedom 30 Arms last week, hoping to squeak in before the new system kicks in to register the serial number on his magazine-fed semiautomatic rifle he had shipped overnight from Texas.
“I’ve been shooting the semiautomatic rifles since I was a kid. It’s a hobby. It’s something I enjoy,” he said.
And the anti-gunners hate that. Though the law is ostensibly aimed at preventing active shooting incidents involving AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles, someone who's really intent on committing an act of mass violence isn't going to be stopped just because they have to jump through a few additional steps before purchasing a rifle. Gang members, drug dealers, and more garden variety violent offenders, meanwhile, will continue to use the black market to get their hands on restricted firearms.
The impact of the law falls squarely on the law-abiding, and law enforcement knows it.
El Paso County Sheriff Joseph Roybal called the new measure “the most egregious and unconstitutional anti-Second Amendment bill in Colorado’s history.”
... Local sheriffs also are allowed to add on their own local administrative and background check fees.
El Paso County Sheriff’s Office won’t charge a fee for El Paso County residents, said spokesperson Cassandra Sebastian. Fees for nonresidents will be listed on the website later this week, she said. The website also will post local facilities that are providing the training.
Roybal thinks the law will “saddle law-abiding Coloradans with unnecessary fees, bureaucratic hurdles and state-mandated registration for those who want to exercise their constitutional rights,” according to a public statement he issued last year after he testified against the bill at the state Capitol.
The Colorado Shooting Sports Association has already launched a lawsuit ahead of the August 1 effective date, and I'm optimistic that they'll be able to get an injunction in place halting enforcement of the law. Though the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has more Democrat-appointed judges than Republican-appointed jurists, the appellate court has upheld a lower court decision that struck down New Mexico's 10-day waiting period as a violation of the Second Amendment, even though an earlier decision left Colorado's three-day waiting period in place.
Del Toro v. Polis has been assigned to U.S. District Judge William Joseph Martínez, a Barack Obama-appointee who specialized in employment and civil rights law before he became a judge. So long as he follows the Supreme Court's guidance in cases like Bruen and Wolford, he should concur with the plaintiffs' argument in their initial complaint:
Because the Act attempts to govern and regulate arms-bearing conduct, the text of the Second Amendment is implicated, and there is no relevantly similar historical analogue from the time of the Founding that can be used to justify the Act’s provisions. Consequently, the Act is violative of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, as made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The legal fight is going to continue for months, and since Colorado's permit-to-purchase scheme is likely to become the gun control lobby's favored way of restricting AR-15s if the Supreme Court strikes down "assault weapon" bans next term, Del Toro will be a hugely important case for gun owners nationwide. While the lawsuit is just getting started, Colorado's spike in gun sales has come to an end... but not before thousands of residents picked up an AR-15 to call their own.
