The Patriot Post® · Colorado Dems Push Anti-Gun Tax

If a recent piece of legislation is any indication, Colorado Democrats want to turn Second Amendment rights into a liability — literally. HB24-1270 represents the latest effort by anti-Second Amendment activists to smuggle in a bill that steps all over Americans’ right to bear arms under the dubious guise of compensating victims of “gun violence.”

The Colorado bill is similar to legislative attempts in California and New York in that they all seek to tax firearm ownership. HB24-1270 would mandate that all gun owners in the state be required to purchase liability insurance for simply owning a firearm. Gun owners who failed to procure liability insurance would face fines of $500 and $1,000, respectively, upon their first and second offenses.

One of the bill’s three sponsors, State House Representative Steven Woodrow, asserts that the legislation would encourage responsible gun ownership, and he pointed to a dubious study that claimed firearm-related deaths and injuries cost the state roughly $12 billion annually.

Beyond this bill being an outright violation of Coloradans’ Second Amendment rights, it’s also a violation of their Fifth Amendment guarantee of innocence until proven guilty. The law effectively applies legal culpability for the criminal use of a firearm on all gun owners simply for owning a similar tool to the one used in the commission of a crime.

Or, as we’ve noted many times before, this bill effectively criminalizes firearm ownership, which is precisely the end objective of the anti-gun lobby.

As the Denver Gazette’s editorial board observed: “[HB2401270] seeks to solve a nonexistent problem — uncompensated damages incurred by firearms — as a cover for its true aim of creating another hurdle to legal gun ownership. In other words, it’s gun control by another name. It also amounts to a gun tax (as well as a boon to the insurance industry).” Exactly.

Despite the fact that Democrats control Colorado’s legislature, the chances that this legislation would actually pass — and survive a veto by centrist Democrat Governor Jared Polis — is highly unlikely. Just last year, Polis’s opposition to a bill that would have banned semiautomatic firearms likely led to the bill’s failure to pass the legislature.

The Gazette further noted that should the bill pass and become law, roughly 2.5 million Coloradans would be on the hook for purchasing liability insurance. This might make certain insurance companies happy — those that dare to cross the anti-gun lobby and offer liability coverage.

Democrats in Maryland in January introduced similar legislation that would require gun owners to hold at least $300,000 in liability insurance in order to carry a firearm. That ridiculous bill’s sponsor called it “another effort at common sense gun legislation.” Clearly, these Democrats don’t know what common sense is.

Blaming the innocent for the actions of the criminal is the very definition of injustice. And isn’t that what these anti-Second Amendment activists claim to be fighting against?