Ever since the shooting in an Aurora theater, Colorado has clearly been embracing just about every gun control trend that comes down the line. Among those were things like red flag laws.

However, as we learned last year, their red flag law didn’t do much to stop the King Soopers shooting, so now they’re going to do it all over again.

Loud calls for gun reform in Colorado immediately followed a gunman killing 10 people at a Boulder supermarket last year. Since then, lawmakers have delivered on some of those requests, including a measure to block gun sales to people convicted of violent misdemeanors.

But other new laws are still in the works a year after the shooting.

Boulder City Councilmember Rachel Friend said the city is getting ready to reinstate its ban on assault-style weapons. The rule was struck down by a judge just days before the shooting last year. In response, the state legislature passed a new law to let cities and towns pass their own gun regulations.

Friend said Boulder may go even further with restricting guns than it did before.

“So we’re looking at open carry and ghost guns and waiting periods (for gun purchases) and carrying in sensitive areas such as museums and city buildings and places like that,” she said.

None of which has anything to do with what actually happened in a grocery store. However, as we’ve noted a few times before, gun control rarely has anything to do with what happened, what happened just becomes a pretext for them to do all the things they wanted to do in the first place.

Bans on so-called assault weapons won’t stop these kinds of things because, frankly, lawmakers don’t really know how to differentiate between those evil guns and others except by cosmetic features. They don’t get that those cosmetic differences are really the only differences. In other words, bans like that don’t really accomplish what they think they will.

Colorado should have learned from other places that such bans don’t do much.

Then again, they should have learned red flag laws don’t do much either.

Missing from this conversation is that the shooter’s history and mental health issues were more than enough grounds for someone in his family to have justified using a red flag order to disarm him. No one did.

So rather than acknowledge that the laws they passed weren’t doing anything, they just ignore that fact and start looking at the next set of laws to pass, none of which will stop the next mass shooting.

Folks, laws aren’t good at preventing things. They’re useful for punishing certain behavior, but they won’t prevent that behavior from happening. People who are inclined to kill will still kill.

Yet throughout Colorado, we see people who think they can get it right, despite ample evidence they can’t.

Their efforts prior to King Soopers failed and their efforts after it won’t fare any better. The true shame is that they’re not putting forth any effort to actually get to the root cause of mass shootings so they can try and address it there.

But that would take more effort than Colorado lawmakers want to expend.