There are a lot of gun control laws that are just outright stupid. I'm not talking about the ones that are mostly just stupid if you don't know anything. I'm talking about those that look moronic on just the surface. Like universal background checks, sold as a way to stop criminals from getting guns.
But Colorado has taken it to an all-new low.
See, there's this idea that children and guns can never mix. Kids aren't supposed to look at guns, know about guns, or anything else unless their parent consents, and the anti-gun side isn't even fond of it then.
That's why they've created laws that they claim address marketing to kids, but really cut off any communication with young people interested in shooting or shooting sports entirely.
Colorado, though, went even deeper.
One of the modern tenets of the gun-control playbook is: Make war on youth participation. This is the long game—if they can suppress youth participation in hunting and the shooting sports, then they will have a better chance of convincing majorities to vote away this freedom in the future.
This reasoning must be the anti-gun motivation behind a gun-control law in Colorado that goes into effect on January 1, 2026, barring anyone under 18 from attending a gun show without a parent or guardian.
To even put on a show, organizers in Colorado must now prepare and submit a security plan to local law enforcement (including vendor lists, attendee estimates, camera coverage and more) and have liability insurance for the event.
But, in particular, this exclusion of unaccompanied minors—despite the gun-control activists’ already articulated rationale—is dumb. First, minors typically come with family members, so after they are subjected to declaring they are indeed so accompanied, anyone under 18 is going to walk in wondering why a constitutional right is being so treated as a bad thing. This certainly would have made me, when I was a teen, become even more suspicious of government authority.
Now, keep in mind that Colorado already has universal background checks, so no lawful seller, even a non-licensed one, is going to mistakenly sell a gun to a 17-year-old at such a show.
They can't. Not lawfully.
So what's the deal here? What is the justification for this?
Well, it's really just about separating young people from the firearm community as much as they can get away with. Even young people who might be interested, but their parents object. They can't do anything but just walk around, and seeing all of the guns there might remind them that contrary to what they hear in the media and at home, the right to keep and bear arms still exists and is still an actual right "of the people," as the Second Amendment makes clear.
But Colorado wants to preclude that. They know they can't shield kids from gun families from that understanding, but they want to do that with everyone else so that gun ownership continues to be stigmatized. They want to push us all into the closet as much as they can, all so people will have the same view of gun ownership as what we see in places like the UK and Australia.
That's what they want, because they know that it's the only way they'll be able to eviscerate the Second Amendment.
Of course, as noted in the above-linked piece, there's a potential backlash as those of a counter-cultural lean may see the forbidden nature of guns as making them cooler than they might ordinarily be. Depending on just who that is, it could be a good thing. It could also be a very bad thing should their counter-cultural ideas go beyond hoisting a middle finger to the ruling leftist elite and be directed toward society as a whole.
Whoops.
