When Colorado lawmakers evaluated their Office of Gun Violence Prevention in January, things got tense.
The lawmakers who led efforts to launch this office in the wake of the Boulder King Soopers shooting said it was not having the impact they expected it would.
“Somehow it's a bottleneck. And you have, what, $3 million? And none of it has been allocated to the people who are trying to keep our community safe,” State Sen. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, told the office’s leaders.
State Sen. Sonja Jaquez Lewis, D- Boulder, said she was “extremely disappointed” in the office’s inaugural two years because it hadn’t started spending money on gun prevention initiatives.
Six months after that criticism, money is going out the door.
And some of the office’s harshest critics say they’re pleased with the progress being made around the state.
This summer, a $450,000 grant program has reached 29 community groups.
And Laney Sheffel is using some of that money to help save lives, one classroom at a time.
Turning the tide
Last week, Sheffel helped teach a classroom of teenage girls at a summer camp in Denver how they could all help prevent gun violence.
Sheffel is a campaign manager for Colorado Ceasefire, the state’s largest gun safety advocacy group.
For two hours, she and two teenage interns taught the girls about Colorado’s new red flag laws, which let people ask a judge to temporarily take guns away from someone who poses a risk to themselves or others.
They played videos full of data about gun violence and methods to reduce it.
The girls also learned what to do if they’re concerned about how a parent or adult is storing a firearm.
“Just totally stop what you’re doing, don’t touch it. Leave the situation and go tell an adult,” Sheffel told the children.
During another exercise, all of the girls were asked if they’ve personally been affected by gun violence.
Without any hesitation, most were able to remember a case of being in a lockdown at school or being kept at home because of shootings in their neighborhood.
When it was Sheffels' turn to share, she revealed one reason she got into the work…
“I lost one of my good friends to suicide by firearm when I was in college,” she told the girls. “And it was really, really tough.”
After the gun violence prevention lesson, Sheffel reveals some of the other items the grant is paying for.
She has gun trigger locks in her trunk to hand out for free. She also has boxes of brochures on safe gun storage and how to use the red flag laws.
“We have a responsibility to do more because I just sat in a room of 15 young women that all shared a really quite shockingly close story of their lives and how an incident with gun violence has made them miss school, miss, you know, not be able to spend time with their relatives,” she said. “And it just made me feel really even more empowered to continue doing this work and make sure we get this message out a little bit farther.”
The Office of Gun Violence Prevention’s new grant program is also funding a broader effort to educate residents about the red flag laws.
Gov. Jared Polis and others have said the so-called extreme risk protection orders could have prevented the Boulder King Soopers shooting.
But Polis said he doesn’t think enough residents know about it.
Rachel Dane, who works with a Boulder non-profit that helps file the protection orders, said the data also shows the new law isn’t being used as much as expected.
Supporters of the red flag law say it can temporarily remove a gun from someone posing a threat to themselves or others.
The program was expanded this year to allow teachers, mental health providers, district attorneys and doctors to petition to have a person's firearms taken away.
“We would expect to see 500 (protection orders) granted in Colorado every year, and the number is much, much smaller than that,” Dane said.
Records show there were less than 400 protection orders granted in Colorado during the first 3 years of the law. And that’s what Dane and Bridge to Justice are hoping to change.
They’re using their grant money to advertise the red flag laws and will use the funding to go to court with people to help them through the process.
“It's a very alien environment. It’s very stressful,” Dane said of filing a protection order. “And when somebody is already dealing with safety concerns and the trauma that comes along with situations like that, there is understandable hesitancy around engaging in a new process without knowing what's happening.”
Big goals
Jonathan McMillan, the head of Colorado’s Office of Gun Violence prevention, said the program’s impact will be judged by data.
“Success in its most simple terms is lowering the rate of firearm injuries and death in Colorado,” he said. “Obviously we haven’t reached it yet, but the groundwork has been laid.”
Colorado’s Gun deaths reached a forty year high in 2021, with more than one thousand victims. Suicide was the leading cause. The final data for last year hasn’t been released yet.
McMillan says one of the biggest impacts he has already seen from the first wave of grants is helping youth in southwest Denver start a new magazine.
“It talks all things about the the neighborhood itself, about gun violence and youth violence prevention projects in the neighborhood, and best practices around what it looks like for community led efforts around violence prevention,” he said.
He says the magazine is produced across the street from a bar where a recent shooting took place.
As groups spend more of this grant money, some of the lawmakers who criticized the gun violence prevention office a few months ago say they’re happy with the progress. Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis of Boulder County was one of the harshest critics.
“I'm pleased that the grant program is off the ground,” she said. “I'd like to know more about where some of the future grants, how that process will look. And I'd like to know what the office itself is planning for the next year.”
McMillan says an even bigger grant program is a top goal for the next year. He noted 75 groups applied for the money, meaning only about 50 percent were able to get a piece of what was available.
He’s also expecting a boost in funding from the federal Safer Communities Act, which passed last year to help states promote red flag laws.
McMillan says he welcomes the feedback from lawmakers.
“The commentary was reassuring to understand that everyone is just as passionate as I am about getting the solutions out there,” he said.
Meanwhile, Laney Scheffel of Ceasefire Colorado has more programs scheduled to teach gun violence prevention. She says she feels like she’s making progress every time she unpacks her car and enters a classroom.
“I think with gun violence, we're seeing people really do feel really hopeless and like there isn't any type of solution to it,” she said. “And being a person that comes in and says, ‘if you just know about safe storage, if you know about ERPO (Extreme risk protection orders), if you start normalizing these conversations, then we can really start to change the tide on this.”
The Office of Gun Violence Prevention’s next performance review is set for January.
