High school students rallied on the State Capitol steps and filled its halls Thursday to demand legislative action to curb gun violence as Democratic lawmakers consider a slew of gun control bills.
“I'm skipping my classes to be here at the Capitol today, to advocate for something that everyone should be involved in and be aware of,” Kimaya Kini, a junior at Cherry Creek High School and vice president of the school’s chapter of the gun violence advocacy group Students Demand Action, said. “It's not about taking away people's guns. It's about the protection of our public.”
About 100 students and parents were at the statehouse Thursday, far fewer than during last year’s gun violence protests, which took place at a time when gun bills in the legislature were farther-reaching and more politically-charged.
This year, anti-gun violence advocates are especially focused on a bill that would prohibit guns in so-called “sensitive spaces,” including schools, hospitals, churches, recreation centers and other relevant locales. Under current law, the only gun-free zones in Colorado are polling places.
“We can protect a polling location but we also need to protect my school,” Kini said. “Like the field I play soccer at, like the Broncos stadium. I don't need to show up everywhere I go and wonder if someone's going to hurt me.”
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The bill’s sponsors said the measure would also ban guns within the State Capitol, where currently lawmakers are permitted to carry firearms.
“We're living in a state where there's firearms all over,” Sponsor Sen. Sonya Jaquez-Lewis said. “This is about common sense. If you have a firearm, have it in another place away from vulnerable populations, away from vulnerable places.”
The bill does not include movie theaters or grocery stores in its list of sensitive spaces, even though two of Colorado’s most deadly mass shootings took place in those spaces. In 2012, a gunman opened fire in an Aurora movie theater, killing 12 people and injuring 70 others. In 2021, a mass shooting in a Boulder King Soopers grocery store took the lives of 10 people.
But Jaquez-Lewis said since both grocery stores and movie theaters are generally privately-owned, adding them to this list of places with gun restrictions would likely hurt the bill’s chances in the legislature.
Other gun control bills would increase the training and storage requirements for concealed carry permits, implement a specific merchant code for firearms that could be used to track gun sales, and require insurance coverage for gun owners.
Republicans oppose the measures.
“We look at them as incremental steps of eroding the Second Amendment,” Republican Rep. Ty Winter, the House assistant majority leader, said. “I mean, who should have an insurance policy to cover their Second Amendment right, their God-given right, given to them by the Constitution and our founding fathers.”
Republicans have put forward some of their own gun legislation this year. One that is still under consideration would subsidize metal detectors and other firearm detection technology in schools. Another would have increased the penalty for stealing a firearm to a level six felony, but the bill was rejected by the Democratic majority in a legislative committee last month.
