Remember when Boulder, Colorado banned the ownership of AR-15 rifles? They also banned high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, giving gun owners with such magazines until July 15, 2018 to either sell them or dispose of them—whatever that means. Most likely, you’ll have to turn them over to the authorities. Now, there is a grandfather clause allowing residents who already owned AR-15s to keep them as long as they get a certificate by the local sheriff’s office. Well, that date is rapidly approaching. AR-15 owners have until December 27 to certify their weapons. If owners fail to do this, they won’t be allowed to own their rifles within city limits. So far, only 85 rifles have been certified (via Denver Post):
Boulder police have certified 85 assault weapons to residents with less than a month to go before all such firearms will need to be verified or removed from the city.
A ban on the sale or possession of assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks was passed unanimously in May by Boulder city council. Guns already owned by residents were grandfathered in; council gave residents until the end of the year to obtain a certificate.
Certification is not a registry; the department keeps no records or paperwork of any kind. The only information they have is a handwritten count, said Boulder police Sgt. Dave Spraggs. Eighty-seven certificates have been issued to date. Two of those were redundancies, for the same weapon shared between a husband and wife.
This is nonsense. And yes, it may not be a registry, but it sure sounds like a test run. We all know that the anti-gun Left wants to shred the Constitution, ban firearms, and confiscate them by force if necessary. How can one do that efficiently? You need a gun registry, which is why the universal background check push is such a fraud. We have enough laws on the books that prevents criminals and nutcases from committing heinous acts. In recent months, we’ve seen that such laws are not enforced all the time, however. Just look at the Navy Yard Shooting, Dylann Roof’s preventable hate crime in South Carolina, and the Sutherland Springs shooting in Texas, where an Air Force veteran, who served a year in jail after a 2012 court martial for domestic violence, was allowed to purchased an AR-15 because…the Air Force did not inform the FBI of his conviction. The recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Broward County, Florida was also preventable.
I’ll let Tom Knighton at our sister site Bearing Arms sign off on this one:
Councilman Brockett thinks he wants to see these guns gone, but he doesn’t understand what that world would look like. He doesn’t get that with every gun unavailable to the law-abiding citizen, there’s another gun the criminals can use without worrying about whether their victims have a way to respond.
That way lies chaos. It leads to horrific crimes that no one can stop, crimes like the gang violence plaguing Mexico where the average citizen is essentially disarmed. You’re deluded if you think the disarmed populace doesn’t play into the cartels’ plans.
I’m not saying it would happen overnight, but it would embolden criminals.
As it stands, Boulder will still have people with these rifles. It’ll have them, and that will keep the worst of this kind of thing away. It’ll let the gun grabbers live in the delusion that they’re somehow safer, at least for a little while.
But it doesn’t change the fact that this is wrong, stupid, and immoral.
Wrong, stupid, and immoral—excellent words to describe American liberalism.