Denver just passed a city-wide “ghost gun” ban. It bans not just making unserialized firearms but also owning one. If you have one that you built years ago, you’d better get rid of it.

This comes just days after a deadly shooting rampage that partly took place in the city.

Now, a Colorado lawmaker representing the area wants to do the same thing throughout the whole state and is using the shooting to justify it.

Unlike after previous mass shootings, Democratic state lawmakers largely refrained from calling for legislative action in the immediate wake of a Dec. 27 shooting spree, which officers have described as a series of five targeted killings. Some expressed their condolences to the five victims’ families and shared resources for the community.

But one Denver Democrat — whose district includes two of the sites where people were murdered — told Newsline following the killing spree that he plans to propose a new gun-safety law.

“We must do better to save innocent lives from gun violence,” Sen. Chris Hansen wrote in a Dec. 28 Twitter post.

 

Without knowing how shooting suspect [name redacted] acquired his weapons, it’s difficult to say whether any state or local actions could have saved the victims’ lives. However, when asked to elaborate on his tweet, Hansen said he’d been talking with colleagues about a variety of potential new firearm policies.

At the top of his priority list: addressing a phenomenon known as “ghost guns,” which Denver City Council voted Monday to effectively ban.

And if you ever had any belief that gun control was meant to address actual crimes, this should be your proof that it’s not.

After all, the media admits they don’t know how the shooter got his firearms. They simply don’t have the information, which means it’s unlikely Hansen has such information either. Yet he’s taking aim at something that’s a non-issue, simply because it’s scary.

We’ve looked at so-called ghost guns before, and I’ve noted that the threat from them is horribly overstated at best. Especially in regard to just how often criminals use them in comparison to more traditional firearms.

Hansen is trying to use the recent shooting to justify something he already wanted to do, even if his proposal would have done nothing to prevent such a crime.

So far as we know, that killer wasn’t prohibited from owning a firearm, so why would banning the building of guns keep a firearm out of his hand?

And let’s not ignore the fact that a law like this would probably do about as much to prevent mass shootings as things like Colorado’s magazine ban did (clearly) or their red flag law. I mean, they’ve got both of those, sold both to the public as being necessary to prevent mass shootings, then they have this happen and are going to try and say the same thing about a ghost gun ban.

All before we even know how the bad guy got his gun this time or even what kind of a gun he used.

No, this has never been about addressing any actual problems and all about using horrible events as leverage to try and push an agenda through.