CO Democrats Boost Prospects For New Laws Targeting Gun Violence

DENVER, CO – By Corey Hutchins for The Colorado Independent. One Saturday in March, a month after the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., angry demonstrators filled Denver’s Civic Center Park with a warning for elected officials: Come Nov. 6, we’ll make our voices heard.

Outraged by the shooting deaths of 17 high school students, they, like other March for Our Lives participants across the country, vowed to turn out politicians who were weak on gun control.

Here in Colorado, they found success. On the cusp of the 20th anniversary of the Columbine killings, Colorado’s blue-wave election ushered in a high-profile gun-control activist and father of a mass-shooting victim to the legislature, dislodged a five-term incumbent congressman backed by the National Rifle Association, and pushed out a prominent gun-rights state senator from Littleton. Voters also elected an attorney general who championed gun safety, and gave Democrats the majority in both legislative chambers, making passage of the “red flag” gun-confiscation law much more likely next year.

The elections in Colorado, which saw a record turnout of unaffiliated voters, by no means hinged on a single issue like guns. Exit surveys found President Donald Trump largely to blame for a resounding defeat of party members who embraced him up and down the ballot.

Still, some candidates made firearms issues a key part of their campaigns, and money from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg poured into the state with messaging about ending gun violence.

In the final weeks of the campaign season, Democrat Jason Crow, who backed a ban on assault-style weapons, campaigned on the issue in his successful bid against incumbent Congressman Mike Coffman of Aurora. Following a mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the group Everytown for Gun Safety paid for $700,000 in advertising to hammer Coffman, a top recipient of NRA donations in Colorado.

At the same time, in the suburbs around Denver, gun-safety Democrats won seats in the Colorado House and Senate and helped hand the party full control of the Capitol for the first time since 2014.

Several were backed by groups like Colorado Ceasefire, which seeks to curb gun violence. The group this week boasted that 90 percent of the money it invested in races went to winning candidates. “Affirmative of the work of the gun violence movement, many of the winning candidates campaigned on issues dealing with gun violence,” the group posted on its website. The sentiment is the opposite of that in Florida, where gun-safety advocates on election night were reeling after gun-rights candidates appear to have narrowly won the governorship and a seat in the U.S. Senate.

READ MORE in The Colorado Independent

Photo by Ray Dehler for creative Commons on Flickr