Colorado, Washington Gun Control Working About Like You’d Expect

There are a whole lot of people out there who seem to think that the only way to take violence seriously is to pass gun control. They claim it’s proven to work, that it will work, and that if you don’t support it, you just want to see dead children or something.

I’m more than a little sick of that nonsense.

On this side of the debate, we argue that gun control does no such thing. That apparently gets ignored, of course, or they think we’re lying and we really do agree with them.

However, the numbers aren’t what the other side likes to think.

Ammoland took a look at Colorado, where they recently went hard down the anti-gun rabbit hole, and what they found was rather interesting.

Colorado has passed dozens of gun laws in the last decade — and gun deaths went up, not down.

In 2014, Colorado reported 86 gun homicides; in 2023, the most recent year with available data, 237 people were killed with guns in homicides.

— AmmoLand News (@AmmoLand) August 7, 2025

All of the restrictive gun control measures adopted over the past decade haven’t reduced gun-related violent crime.

Colorado isn’t the only place where gun control laws have not fulfilled their promises, and violent crime has increased, rather than decreased.

— AmmoLand News (@AmmoLand) August 7, 2025

Wait…there’s more?

Oh yeah.

In Washington state, starting with the passage of gun control Initiative 594 in 2014, the annual body counts just crept upward until 2022-2023.

In 2015, 209 people were murdered in Washington state, and by 2022, the count had risen to 394 slayings.

By 2023, the number had…

— AmmoLand News (@AmmoLand) August 7, 2025

Of course, Washington state is another that went hard down the anti-gun road of late, so this isn’t surprising.

Now, a couple of caveats here.

First, these are raw numbers, not per capita, so the impact is probably less severe than it might look here. The population has likely increased in both states, which means that the per capita rate isn’t quite as high as the raw totals might suggest.

Also, this doesn’t account for any other factors that might have played into an increase in homicides.

Finally, correlation doesn’t equal causation. However, causation should equal correlation, and the fact that homicides increased in both states after they started pushing gun control runs counter to the claim that gun control reduces so-called gun violence.

If it did, would we see such a spike?

Yes, everything went up when the pandemic hit, but gun control in states like Colorado was supposed to prevent this from happening. It didn’t.

Ammoland also noted that for raw homicide totals, California is still the league leader, despite the plethora of gun control laws passed over the last few decades. Shocking, I know.

Laws don’t impact anyone but the law-abiding. The law-abiding are generally not the ones who kill other people except in self-defense. It kind of goes with that whole “law-abiding” thing, you know?

That means the people who kill others as a matter of course aren’t following gun control laws. This is common sense, which I get is so rare these days it qualifies as a super power, but still…

These numbers don’t show anything shocking. The only shocking thing they could show would be an actual decrease, and they don’t, so…

Editor’s Note: With violent crime falling to historic lows while millions of Americans have embraced their Second Amendment rights, it’s clear that more guns doesn’t equate to more crime.

Help us push back on the anti-gunners’ false narrative by becoming a Bearing Arms VIP Member, and use the promo code FIGHT to take 60% off your membership!