How Colorado has tightened its gun laws since the Aurora shooting

After the jury handed down a guilty verdict in the James Holmes trial, family members of the victims drew parallels to the shooting in Chattanooga that killed five others and wounded two that same day. “Today we’ve got someone in Tennessee,” said Tom Sullivan, whose son Alex was killed in the theater. “This continues to go on! This should be the last one.”

A week later, a gunman opened fire in a Louisiana theater, killing two others in a scene uncomfortably reminiscent of Aurora. Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was gunned down in the theater, described her frustration on Twitter: “Theater shooting in Louisiana. Numbers of injured unknown. Here we go again America. THIS is freedom?”

The similarity of the movie theater shooting to the one three years ago in Colorado was a blaring reminder that not enough had changed. But some things have.

Colorado now has substantially stronger gun laws than all its neighbors. Of the seven states that it borders, six currently have “F” grades on the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s scorecard, while the seventh has a “D.” Colorado is now up to a “C-,” putting it in 16th place nationally.

The reforms have faced so much resistance that they have already cost some lawmakers their jobs. But so far, they’ve stuck.

By its fundamentals, Colorado is an unlikely place for strong gun laws.

It’s a large western state, with huge rural swaths where hunting is popular and gun-ownership is a long-held tradition. Until recently its politics were quite conservative. Between 1964 and 2008, the state only voted for the Democratic presidential nominee once, and that was due in large part to Ross Perot splitting the conservative vote in 1992.

But after enduring two of the most high-profile gun massacres in the recent memory, Colorado has become host to the nation’s most contentious gun control debate in the past few years.

For years, Colorado had some of the laxest gun laws in the country. It was a western state governed by conservatives, and its laws regarding background checks and ammunition restrictions reflected that.

Then, in 1999, two seniors walked into Columbine high school armed with an arsenal of firearms they had procured through a straw purchaser at a gun show. At the time, background checks on weapons purchased at gun shows were not required. The pair gunned down 13 people and injured an additional 24 before turning the guns on themselves.

It was the deadliest school shooting in US history, until that grim milestone shifted to Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. But the following year when a bill came up in the Republican-controlled state legislature to require background checks at gun shows, it couldn’t even muster enough votes to pass out of committee. Incensed at their lawmakers, citizens ended up gathering enough signatures to put the matter to a statewide vote in 2000. It passed with over 70% of the vote, making Colorado one of the only states west of the Mississippi river to close down the “gun show loophole”. Though it’s often difficult to assess the impact of a single gun law, closing this loophole has dramatically reduced the number of guns bought in Colorado that were then used in crimes.

Even so, the state’s overall gun control laws were still fairly loose. In November 2012, the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence put out its annual ranking of state gun laws. Colorado received a “D”. Earlier that year, James Holmes entered an Aurora theater with an assault rifle and started shooting.

As the community mourned, attention turned to what lawmakers could do to prevent future instances of gun violence. In a highly contentious debate, the Democrat-controlled legislature passed a series of bills in 2013 to tighten the state’s gun laws. Among them were a measure to require universal background checks in order to prevent buyers from skirting background checks by purchasing weapons from private sellers online, for instance, and a ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds, like those used in Columbine and Aurora.

Two awful tragedies were enough to to galvanize lawmakers.

“I think Colorado is one of the states in the wake of Aurora and Newtown that took the strongest actions to improve their gun laws,” Arkadi Gerney, senior vice-president at the Center for American Progress, which advocates for stronger gun laws, told the Guardian. He credited it with “the Most Improved Award” in the past few years.

But those gains have been precarious. Gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO), livid at the new laws, soon targeted four Democratic lawmakers with recall campaigns. Two of the September 2013 recall campaigns were successful, including one unseating the then Colorado senate president, John Morse, a Democrat. A third Democratic senator resigned her seat before facing a recall vote. Though Democrats won back both seats in the 2014 election, gun rights groups felt the recalls sent a powerful backlash message.

Buoyed by their success, RMGO and GOP lawmakers began targeting the laws themselves for repeal. After winning control of the state senate in 2014 by a single seat, Republicans put forth a dozen bills to chip away at the new gun measures or otherwise buttress gun rights, including allowing concealed carry permit-holders to bring guns into schools. A push to repeal the new ban on high-capacity magazines seemed to have the highest chance of success, but the effort was beset from the outset by verbal gaffes from supporters, including GOP Representative Kim Ransom, who said extended clips were “just this little harmless piece of plastic”, and Republican former senator Bernie Herpin, who said it “was maybe a good thing that [James Holmes] had a 100-round magazine, because it jammed”. Despite initial optimism on the right, all 12 bills were ultimately voted down.

Gerney wasn’t surprised. Once new gun laws are implemented, he explained, it’s exceedingly rare that they are repealed. “I think for the most part the prognosis for the new gun laws in Colorado is pretty good,” he said.