Colorado and ‘Gun Deserts’

The right to keep and bear arms implies the right to acquire guns. It doesn’t spell it out, but how can one keep and bear something they are unable to acquire? 

We all know that the government isn’t going to just give us guns. The crowd that likes guns tends to oppose government handouts, and because of that disparity, we’re never going to get universal gun ownership akin to the pushes for universal healthcare. No, we have jobs, so we can buy them on our own.

But what if that’s not a reasonable proposition? What if you live in what writer Cory Gaines calls a “gun desert?”

The progressive press in Colorado like to label places where some resource or service is scarce as a “desert”.  A quick online search brings up multiple examples such as transit deserts, news deserts, food deserts, and education deserts, among plenty of others.

There is one kind of desert I didn’t find, however, a shortage of places where you could legally purchase firearms. But this doesn’t mean such a thing doesn’t exist.  In a recent edition of my newsletter, I dug through federal records on firearms dealers, and sure enough, as I have heard more than once, Colorado has several Second Amendment deserts, places in the state where there are few firearms dealers.  And the desert keeps getting drier.

Squeezing out gun sellers

To sell firearms commercially, you must register with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and get a Federal Firearms License (FFL).  The ATF then maintains searchable public records of these dealers.  I was able to pull these records for Colorado FFLs between the years of 2021 and 2026.  Using this data, I created a searchable map showing FFL’s in Colorado.  I also focused on three of Colorado’s largest cities which, at least partly, span the state’s geography and politics–Denver, Colorado Springs, and Grand Junction.

The pattern was easy to see.  There are numerous regions of Colorado where FFL’s are sparse–the northwestern corner of the state and the Eastern Plains being the thinnest.  If you zoom in on the map, and have a sense of geography, it’s not hard to see that for some Coloradans, the nearest gun dealer can be upwards of an hour away. Compounding the problem, this nearest dealer might be a private individual, not a store keeping regular hours.

It isn’t just that there are places in Colorado where you’d struggle to find an FFL. If you look at their numbers across time, you’ll see that Colorado is also losing FFL’s. Statewide, FFL’s fell by 18 percent from 2021 to 2026, with Denver (hardly a gun rights friendly city) leading the three cities I checked with an astounding 58% drop in FFL’s over that same time period. If the arrow continues to point this way, it will at the very least get even harder for law-abiding Coloradans to find a dealer.

It would be easy to argue that the reason there aren’t gun stores in those regions is that there aren’t enough would-be gun buyers to justify it. I don’t know enough about the various regions of Colorado to say one way or another,  but because some of these towns aren’t massive urban centers, it seems likely that there’s a pro-gun lean to many of them. For residents to have to travel so far to purchase a gun, it’s a problem.

Especially since there’s a 72-hour waiting period on gun purchases, which means driving an hour to buy the gun, then going home, waiting 70 hours from the time of purchase, then driving an hour back to pick up the gun.

So yeah, gun deserts are a thing, and the side of the aisle that likes to make a thing about “whatever deserts” isn’t going to say a blasted thing about it. I don’t expect them to, of course, because this isn’t some side effect of their preferred policies on guns. It’s the entire point. They don’t lament gun deserts. They want more of them.

They’re not even all that good at pretending otherwise.

They say, “I support the Second Amendment, but…” and that “but” is always proof that what they call “support” is, at best, toleration for the time being. They want gun deserts, not just in Colorado but for the entire nation, and they’re always going to push for policies that create them.

Mexico technically has gun rights for citizens. In practice, they make it virtually impossible for anyone to buy a firearm, up to and including turning most of the country into a gun desert, with only two legal gun stores in the country, and mountains of paperwork required before you can even step into one of them. How has that worked out for them? Oh yeah, entire swaths of the country answer to the cartels, rather than the Mexican government.

That’s what “I support gun rights, but…” gets us, if we’re lucky.

While some aspect of gun deserts may well be a lack of enough of a market to support a store, we can’t overlook how regulations continue to make it harder for these small stores to thrive. Those create gun deserts, and those need to go.

Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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