February 23, 2023 04:18 PM UTC

Rocky Mountain Gun Asshole Disrupts Press Conference

• 5 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Denver7’s Meghan Lopez reports on the press conference by Colorado Senate Democrats today announcing four new pieces of legislation intended to curb gun violence. All of the legislation announced today concerns lawful access to weapons, not outright bans on any particular type of firearm:

Democratic lawmakers have unveiled a series of bills that will add more regulations around the purchase and possession of firearms in Colorado.

On Thursday, House and Senate Democrats hosted a press conference announcing four bills. They mark the biggest slate of gun reforms in the state since a package of gun bills passed in 2021 in the wake of the Boulder King Soopers mass shooting.

The four pieces of legislation announced today–raising the age limit to 21 to purchase firearms; a three-day waiting period for delivery of gun purchases; strengthening the state’s “red flag” law; and tightening liability on gun manufacturers–are certain to provoke a significant confrontation with the gun lobby, whose power has waned along with the Republican Party’s sweeping losses in recent elections. After the high point of pushback from the gun lobby after the General Assembly’s passage of landmark gun safety reforms in 2013, their bellicose threats have proven politically impotent, best demonstrated by the failure in 2019 to recall now-Sen. Tom Sullivan of Centennial in a campaign spearheaded by the Colorado Republican Party’s Kristi Burton Brown with the help of the far-right Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.

That’s the same RMGO who made national news earlier this month when staffer Kevin Lorusso challenged statistics on gun violence deaths among children by asserting Black males should be removed from such statistics, as their deaths are supposedly “a different issue.” In a garbage non-apology, RMGO claimed Lorusso “misspoke,” while Lorusso himself maintains he meant exactly what he said. The same press release also declared that RMGO would not be answering any more questions about the incident, because apparently that’s something a public advocacy organization gets to arbitrarily declare.

But at today’s presser by Colorado Senate Democrats announcing their new gun safety bills, RMGO still felt empowered to ask questions. Or at least shout them out of turn:

Let’s set aside the breach of decorum under the dome this represents on the part of RMGO, wherein we’re old enough to remember when this kind of disruption would have been vociferously condemned by both parties. Given that Sen. Tom Sullivan is a career employee of the United States Postal Service who lost his son in the July 2012 Aurora theater mass shooting, we’re trying to imagine a lower blow than suggesting Sen. Sullivan might be “going postal.” It’s a statement perfectly calculated to be as inhumanly awful to Sen. Sullivan as possible, and there’s no way it was an accident.

In their long history of bedeviling Democrats and fellow Republicans alike with their uncompromising mission of not just gun rights but free proliferation, one has ever accused RMGO of being tactful. At some point, however, one has to ask whether this kind of pointless ad hominem vitriol is persuasive to anyone, even those who agree with RMGO on the issue.

The only way to make the vileness stop, if that’s even possible, is to never let it win.