Since the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, Colorado has gone deeper and deeper down the anti-gun rabbit hole. Much of that is driven by Californians moving into the state, I'm sure, but the massacre really did mark a turning point in the state's approach to guns.
And a recent shooting on the same day as Charlie Kirk's assassination has prompted still more calls for gun control in the state.
However, as Bill Cawthon notes over at Ammoland, they already have the laws they're demanding. And they flat-out didn't work despite claims that focusing on the people is "gaslighting."
To ensure it’s not forgotten, the unnamed author of the editorial repeats the gaslighting comment later in the piece and adds: “Only liars and fools hold onto that trembling thread of nonsense.”
When gun homicides account for just 25% of all violent deaths, it’s not the guns. When the majority of death rates for one group are suicides, while the majority of deaths in another group are homicides, it’s not the guns – no matter how desperately gun-grabbers might wish it was.
The Sentinel editors, filled with self-righteousness, parrot just about every gun control trope and meme to excoriate politicians who “tout their five-star rating from the National Rifle Association for working to undermine gun-control laws that might have spared two injured students and the life of the student gunman, and lives lost every day to guns all over the nation.”
The Sentinel is in Colorado, a state where legislators have not only passed increasingly onerous state restrictions in every session since 2013, they repealed the state’s preemption law, allowing every wide spot in the road to enact its own gun control regime.
Have these laws spared any lives? Nope.
According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the state’s gun murder rate doubled from 2013 to 2024. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent data shows a 47% jump in firearm suicides. The city of Aurora saw a 146% increase in gun murders between 2013 and 2024.
Among actual children (<1 to 17), Colorado’s gun violence death rate climbed 113% from 2013 to 2023, above the national average.
In other words, despite numerous gun control laws already on the books in the state, the homicide rates have skyrocketed.
To keep demanding gun control laws in the wake of having passed them is an admission that the laws in question simply don't work. That's obvious from these statistics.
Yet that didn't make it into the editorial Cawthon is responding to for some silly reason. Instead, it's just another vague call for restrictions on our rights, and a call that the problem is, in fact, the guns and only gun control can save us.
However, again, they have all these laws that are an attack on firearms and the rights of people to own them, and the results speak for themselves.
But like most anti-gunners, statistics are only relevant when they reflect what they want them to reflect.
This span starts the year after the Aurora theater massacre. It doesn't cover this year only because there's no data available just yet. There's no attempt to misdirect here, unlike what we see from the anti-gun groups.
Look, I'm just going to point out that they might have something approaching a point if the only homicides were with a gun. Then you could probably make the case that guns are the problem. It's not.
Yes, guns might be the lion's share of them, but that still only accounts for a quarter of all violent deaths. It can't be the guns if that's the case. That still leaves 75 percent of all other violent deaths on the table.
Again, though, they want the same restrictions that the state already has. Evergreen High School was a shooting that involved a revolver, though, which is already restricted as much as it's going to be for the foreseeable future. Other high-profile shootings lately have used bolt-action rifles. Those aren't likely to get restricted.
So what exactly does anyone on that editorial board think will actually work?
Or do they even care?
