Being a public servant of any kind can be kind of tricky. After all, you're working for the government, and that can mean massive swings in what that government actually seeks to accomplish. It's also important that those who work for the government do their best to keep their own opinions in check, at least while working in an official capacity. Everyone is welcome to their own opinions, but they're not free to express them on the taxpayer's dime.
However, in Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners' Cory Gaines argues that some public servants are only serving part of the public.
The contention that SB25-003 “promotes public safety” is one, not proven, and, two, not something that everyone believes. It’s perfectly reasonable to see it as not promoting public safety, in fact.
Chasing down which state agency made this contention (the email had three different agencies listed: DOR, CPW, and the Colorado Bureau of Investigations) and what they based it on is the reason an email from May 22 is showing up in something posted at the end of June.
This was not a quick or easy answer to get, but the answer is that the contention that SB25-003 “promotes public safety,” as opposed to a more neutral statement such as “is intended to promote…,” was made by someone at DOR.
When I finally figured that out and wrote DOR’s spokespeople with my questions about the basis for this contention, I got the following back (quoting from my email to the spokesperson, with embedded links and formatting left intact):
“The Department of Revenue, Firearms Dealers Division is working to implement the law as it was written. The Department of Revenue cannot speculate on what the public safety component was based, and encourages you to reach out to the bill’s sponsors to discuss public safety. Please let us know if we can help further. For SB 25-003, the following measures are outlined:
I won't get into the bullet points because they're kind of irrelevant to the point here. Gaines goes on to discuss follow-ups a bit, then we get to the meat of his conclusion about what's happening.
In response to questions like these, I got the following semi-answer from DOR’s spokesperson:
“The response you received was a standard response from our rulemaking team, which typically does not respond to follow-up questions [my questions were originally directed as a reply to the address that sent me this missive]. The Department of Revenue and its divisions regularly host rulemaking sessions, where further public comments are accepted. Information about the Firearms Dealers Division’s upcoming rulemaking sessions can be found at SBG.Colorado.gov/2026-Firearms-Dealer-Rulemaking-Working-Groups. Thanks again and have a great day!”
I put all this together and I can’t help but get the gut feeling that someone, or someones, at DOR is injecting their politics into their jobs.
It's possible that this really is just a reaction to what lawmakers claimed the bill was designed to do--"promote public safety," as noted above--and they have no actual opinions on the matter one way or another. Gaines does admit that there are other possible reasons for this.
However, I happen to think he's right, because he notes in the first block quote that "is intended to promote public safety" is both more neutral and more accurate, especially right now, when at least this part of the law hasn't gone into effect. Even if you support gun control and honestly believe it will work as intended, it hasn't yet, so saying it does is issuing a value judgement on a law that's still going through a process required prior to implementation is kind of presumptuous.
In other words, the press release Gaines is talking about assumes facts not in evidence, then presents them as, you know...facts.
He's right to wonder if this is the result of public servants allowing their own biases to color their work. Then again, as we saw during DOGE's look at the federal bureaucracy, it's pretty clear that the left controls the civil service, but it's also clear that anti-gunners control it in much of the states, too. It's not a stretch to see that impacting simple press releases where language they think of as innocuous happens to also be nothing but anti-gun bias.
And these people wonder why no one trusts the government anymore.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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