W e have been here before.
It is a common reaction by Coloradans to news that S.B. 7, a bill to repeal the state’s ban on gun magazines holding more than 15 rounds of ammunition, is still alive in Denver.
We have been here before because a similar effort in March of last year picked up some steam before effectively dying in a House committee decision to indefinitely postpone a vote.
On Monday, an effort to take S.B. 7 off a list of bills ready to be adopted failed, despite the efforts of Democrats who spoke in defense of the ban.
One speaker invoked memories of the July 20, 2012 mass shooting inside a movie theater in Aurora, in which 12 people lost their lives and 70 more were injured when James Eagan Holmes opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a 100-round drum magazine at a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises.
We have been here before, Sen. Rhoda Fields, D-Aurora, may well have been thinking when she rose to speak on Monday, remembering not just last year’s legislative effort, but the horror that visited her home district on that night, the event that led to the passage of the high-capacity magazine ban a year later.
Likely, her thoughts went further back, to the April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, in which Dylan Klebold, one of two teen shooters, was armed with a shotgun and a semi-automatic handgun with three high-capacity magazines holding 52, 32 and 28 rounds respectively.
In her speech, Fields called herself a surrogate on behalf of the Aurora theater dead: “High-capacity magazines should be something that you use in war,” she said. “They should not have a place in our churches, in our theaters, in our malls, in our schools.”
Supporters of S.B. 7 echoed calls from the National Rifle Association, which contends that Colorado’s ban on high capacity magazines comprises nothing less than an unconstitutional repeal of the Second Amendment itself.
Sen. Vicki Marble, R-Fort Collins, spoke in that vein before Monday’s 21-14 vote to defeat the motion to remove the bill: “...vote yes for the restoration of the Second Amendment for those millions and millions of innocent and law abiding gun owners who just want the level playing field,” she said, reinforcing the NRA’s stand that the magazine-limit law puts citizens in danger because criminals do not respect such laws. By default, the logic runs, that puts the citizen at a disadvantage because any armed criminal will be carrying magazines capable of holding many more rounds than 15.
Marble and her Senate supporters must envision home-invasion scenarios where the bad guys are at battalion strength, because in the real world, the ban on high-capacity magazines does nothing to limit our Second Amendment rights. It does not ban the purchase of any legal firearm, nor does it limit the number of legal-capacity magazines a gun owner can have on hand. Similar laws have withstood challenges in federal court.
Unfortunately, as Sen. Michael Merrifield, D-Manitou Springs, said, “A ban on high-capacity magazines will not stop shootings in America.”
However, the ban does, as Merrifield pointed out, comprise a sound, common sense attempt to make such shootings less lethal.
Yes, we have all been here before. And like last year, this is where we should stay.
