Colorado Democrats Want to Give Residents the Power to Ban Themselves From Buying a Gun

While Senate Democrats in Denver have hit the “pause” button on their efforts to pass a sweeping semi-auto ban so they can negotiate the details of their bill with Gov. Jared Polis, they’re moving ahead on several other pieces of anti-gun legislation, including one measure that amounts to a voluntary gun ban of sorts. 

SB 34 would create a “voluntary waiver” that residents could sign if they want to prohibit themselves from being able to buy a gun. Last Thursday, the bill advanced out of the Senate State, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee (which hears most gun-related bills in the Senate) on a party-line vote, setting up a floor debate over the measure in the days to come. 

“We know that that helps save lives,” said Ginny Mack, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who lives in Fort Collins.

She began advocating for a do note sell list after serving as a nurse in the U.S. Navy and working with teens and college students.

“This is a self-controlled mechanism to protect oneself from one’s future self in crisis,” she said.

Do we really know that this saves lives? In my experience, these laws are almost never used. In my home state of Virginia there were just a handful of folks who’d placed themselves on the “do not sell” list in the first year of its existence, and in Washington State, which was the first to adopt the measure back in 2018, only 20 people had voluntarily given up their Second Amendment rights in the first three years that the law was in effect. 

The do-not-sell proposal draws from Donna’s Law, a piece of model legislation. Washington, Utah, Virginia and Delaware — have already approved do note sell lists for their residents. The U.S. Congress has also considered a national Do Not Sell registry.

Senate Bill 34 is sponsored by Sen. Cathy Kipp and Rep. Andy Boesenecker, both Fort Collins Democrats. The measure is expected to easily cruise through the Democratic-controlled Colorado legislature.

This particular idea has proven to be far more popular with lawmakers than the general public, so I’m not surprised that SB 34 is on a fast-track to Gov. Jared Polis, and I’m sure he’ll put pen to paper once the bill reaches his desk. 

The chief benefit of a “do not sell” list appears to be for legislators, not individuals with suicidal impulses. Lawmakers can claim to be doing something about mental health without having to get into the messy business of dealing with the shortage of inpatient beds for mental health services or expanding opportunities for outpatient and telemedicine. 

Though many states are underfunding mental health resources, the Longmont Leader reported just a few days ago, that the problem is especially acute in Colorado.

Colorado has faced a shortage of forensic psychiatric beds in its state hospitals for individuals with severe mental illness for nearly a decade, with the height of the shortage occurring in 2023. Forensic psychiatric beds are allocated to people deemed incompetent to stand trial or found not guilty by reason of insanity. 

The years-long shortage has resulted in longer wait times and extended jail stays for those awaiting evaluation or treatment. A Treatment Advocacy Center report published in January 2024 named Colorado as having the third-longest waitlist in the U.S. Throughout 2023, 448 individuals were placed on the waitlist, facing an average delay of 66 days before receiving necessary treatment.

The number of psychiatric beds in Colorado’s state mental health facilities gradually decreased between 2016 and 2023. From 2022 to 2023, the facilities in Denver and Pueblo experienced a 20 percent reduction, bringing the total number of available beds in those hospitals down to 482. 

The decline was not a result of fewer physical beds, but rather a shortage of nursing staff. The Colorado Mental Health Hospital campuses in Pueblo and Fort Logan closed a combined total of 100 beds during the early stages of COVID-19, and some of these beds have not yet reopened.

Last year the Colorado legislature appropriated more than $65 miliion in an effort to reopen some of these beds, but the problems persist. If lawmakers are serious about saving lives they’ll drop the asinine “do-not sell” list that hardly anybody uses to begin with and concentrate on getting those in crisis the help they need. Given the anti-gun machinations on display in Denver this session, however, I’m not holding my breath that we’ll see anything of substance proposed, especially when anti-2A Democrats can demonized gun ownership instead.