Our Commitment to Addressing Gun Violence
Kickoff to Wear Orange to End Gun Violence Week 2022.
While mourning the horrific murders in Buffalo, New York, we witnessed an atrocious mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to gun violence. And we must do better.
I learned about the tragedy in Uvalde not long after joining students and faculty at Golden High School to talk about building safer environments in our schools. The students reminded me of the importance of promoting connections between peers and caring adults in order to build safer communities where students, faculty, and staff care about each other and can readily spot risks. School should be a place of learning, growth, and support—not horrific avoidable tragedies.
We must work harder and develop more solutions to address senseless violence. To do so, we must get better at identifying threats, put protections in place to keep students safe, and ensure that those who pose a danger to themselves or others don’t have access to deadly weapons. Building a culture of safety requires that we work to build relationships of trust (both between students and other students as well as students and adults) and create safe spaces for sharing concerns about mental health, as we discussed at Golden High School.
We absolutely must limit the availability of large capacity weapons. And we need a nationwide restriction on guns like these that can unload multiple rounds in a matter of seconds, similar to Colorado law. As Attorney General, I successfully defended Colorado’s large-capacity magazine law as constitutional and necessary to reduce deaths from mass shootings.
We must continue to use extreme risk protection orders, as provided for by Colorado’s “red flag” law. Colorado’s law was designed to give law enforcement a targeted tool to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people and save lives. It enables a judge to remove guns from someone if the judge determines that person poses a major risk of hurting themselves or others. I pushed for this law and have worked on implementing it. And I also pushed for a special protection order law focused on protecting victims of domestic violence.
Last fall, we released a report to evaluate how this red flag law worked in its first year. We found that it is being used responsibly, but we need to improve our education and outreach efforts–including to law enforcement agencies–so we can better use this law. We are currently updating our law enforcement training so this law can be used to save lives.
We also must encourage responsible gun ownership. Owning a gun should require appropriate training, background checks, and awareness of the potential risks. That’s why we are working to support safe storage measures that keep guns from children or criminals. Working with local law enforcement across Colorado, my office developed public education tools to inform firearm owners of how important it is to safely store their guns.
We also must resist efforts to expand the reach of the Second Amendment so that common sense and reasonable protections–like background check requirements and red flag laws–are not declared unconstitutional. We have done so in Colorado, defending the constitutionality of our red flag law, for example. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court appears ready to strike down a New York law on Second Amendment grounds, raising the question as to how far the Court will go to limit gun violence prevention measures. We will continue to defend Colorado’s gun safety measures and we will resist efforts to interpret the Second Amendment more broadly.
I appreciate the support of gun safety groups, and I am proud to be a Gun Sense Candidate, committed to address this public health crisis.
In Colorado, we are committed to doing better, learning from tragedies and working hard to advance common sense measures that can save lives. In my second term, I will continue to make this a top priority.