Legislators in the House voted 40-25 to pass House Bill 1144, the 3D printing bill. At roughly the same time, the state Senate voted 19-16 to advance Senate Bill 43, which would require firearm barrels to be sold or transferred only by a federally licensed firearm dealer. Each bill will now switch to the opposite chamber and restart the process; each are likely to clear their next several votes and move to Gov. Jared Polis.

Both measures were exclusively backed by Democrats, who hold nearly 2-to-1 majorities in both chambers.

HB-1144 would prohibit the manufacturing of 3D printed firearms and gun components, including large-capacity magazines, rapid-fire devices and unfinished frames or receivers. It also bans the selling or distribution of instruction manuals that could be used to produce the devices. Anyone who violates the law would face a misdemeanor charge on a first offense; subsequent violations would result in a felony charge. The bill does not apply to licensed gun manufacturers or accredited gunsmithing programs.

“The ability to access a 3D printed firearm and commit an act that nine times out of 10 is fatal is unique, and (is) something we can speak to. This bill seeks to do that,” Rep. Andy Boeseneker, a Fort Collins Democrat, said during debate Monday. He’s sponsoring the bill with Rep. Lindsay Gilchrist.

Lawmakers previously banned the possession of so-called ghost guns, which are firearms without serial numbers. Between August 2024 and December 2025, the Colorado Bureau of Investigations seized 89 ghost guns — or “personal manufactured firearms” — spokesman Rob Low said in an email last month.

Republicans argued that the bill was unconstitutional and violated the Second Amendment. Rep. Rebecca Keltie, of Colorado Springs, accused one of the bill’s sponsors of legislating because of his “emotions” related to guns. The bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Tom Sullivan, whose son was killed in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting.

Later Monday, the Senate comfortably passed SB-43 after more Republican opposition. In addition to regulating who can sell gun barrels, the bill also requires that sales are made in person and that records about each sale be kept for five years.

Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat who’s also sponsoring the barrel bill, said the proposal is a further attempt to crack down on so-called ghost guns, or unregistered firearms.

“This is not an attempt to put anyone out of business or register anything so that at a later date someone will come to confiscate those items,” Sullivan said during floor debate on Friday, ahead of Monday’s final vote. “Times are changing … (and) the ghost gun has become a new problem for law enforcement.”

Republicans, who opposed the bill, launched a lengthy debate about the legislation Monday morning, characterizing it as an infringement on Second Amendment rights and law-abiding gun owners.

“Here we have a piece of legislation that masquerades as a public safety measure but in reality strikes at the very heart of our constitutional liberties,” Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson, a Republican who lives at the Air Force Academy, said.

The votes kicked off a day of gun-related hearings and debates in the Capitol, where gun control measures have become increasingly common as Democratic lawmakers have settled into comfortable majorities over their Republican colleagues. Elsewhere Monday, a House committee was set to debate bills to tighten regulations on gun sellers and to expand who can ask a court to temporarily take a person’s firearms away. A Republican-backed measure to repeal the ability to file those petitions was also set for its initial hearing.

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Sure, he thought, Colorado had enacted a 15-round limit on firearm magazines earlier that decade, in response to the 2012 Aurora movie theater massacre. But the state otherwise was known at the time for its swing-state purple politics and gun laws that were not otherwise far out of step with the rest of the Mountain West.

As he settled into his new home, however — and before he could open his store — a raft of soon-to-be lawmakers with more ambitious gun-regulation agendas were launching campaigns across the state. The Democrats would take full control of state government in the 2018 blue wave election, and their legislative majorities would go on to pass a slate of laws over the next seven years that established sweeping new standards for gun sales and ownership.

“At that time, we still had the 15-round magazine capacity limit, but we did not have three-day waits — we did not have all this other bureaucratic stuff,” Collins said. “We did not have restrictions on licenses like we see now. We didn’t have SB-3. We didn’t have an excise tax.

“Over the years, just slowly, slowly, Colorado has gone the way — and I fear we’re going the way — of California.”

The sweep of new laws started relatively slowly, with 2019’s extreme risk protection order law. But the pace of new restrictions has picked up unmistakably since then, with lawmakers putting stricter and broader rules on nearly all facets of firearms. Those efforts culminated this spring with the passage of Senate Bill 3 — a law that, when it goes into effect in August 2026, will restrict the sale of many semiautomatic firearms that have detachable magazines unless the buyer has passed a safety course.

Since 2021 alone, Democrats have passed two dozen new gun laws that have affected, among other things, who can own them, sell them and buy them; how gun owners can stow them; how the state taxes and tracks firearms; which guns it allows; who can carry them and where; and who can invoke the state’s red-flag law, as part of an expansion of the 2019 extreme risk protection measure that has allowed authorities to take guns away from their owners temporarily.

Where detractors of all the Democrats’ legislation see an ever-growing list of demands on gun ownership that is eroding their fundamental freedoms, supporters see requirements aimed at fostering responsible gun ownership and rules that put a premium on gun safety.

They have been motivated to tighten gun laws, they say, by the too-common mass shootings and rising routine gun violence that included 943 firearm deaths in Colorado, largely from suicides and homicides, in 2023.

“I’m so proud of where we have come in the legislature when it comes to being true to our convictions, our commitments — to really making an impact and changing the way we look at gun safety and talking about that issue,” said House Majority Leader Monica Duran, a Wheat Ridge Democrat and sponsor of nearly a third of the new gun laws. “We’ve come a long way.”

A timeline of Colorado gun laws since the Aurora movie theater shooting

But Collins, the gun store owner, says he feels like the rug was pulled out from under him after he opened Spartan Defense in 2021. The opening came after he'd weathered pandemic delays -- and right as some of the most notable legislation was being passed.

With hindsight, he's not sure he would have invested in the Colorado Springs store.

"When I got here, business was great," Collins said. "And now, they're just trying to put up all these barriers and roadblocks and red tape."

'Some of the strictest' laws

The Colorado laws passed over the last six years have had a significant real-world effect.

Customers who buy a gun must now wait three days to pick it up. They must pass more stringent background checks, both from the state and the federal government. They must be at least 21 years old to buy any type of gun or ammunition. They cannot have been convicted of a slew of crimes, including any type of assault, a bias-motivated crime, cruelty to animals or harassment.

They must pay a new 6.5% excise tax, which totals $65 on a $1,000 purchase, to generate money for services for crime victims and mental health as well as school safety.

Once a gun is purchased, the owner must store it securely enough that children and people who are ineligible to possess firearms can’t access it. If they keep the gun in a car, they must meet secure storage requirements. Failing to do either can result in a misdemeanor charge.

The owner can’t carry a gun at a polling place or inside government buildings and educational facilities, such as schools and day care centers. If the owner wants to carry the gun concealed, they must pay for and pass an eight-hour course that includes live-fire exercises and a written exam. A refresher course, required every five years for people who already have permits, is two hours and also includes an exam and a live-fire exercise.

And if the person is deemed a threat to themselves or others, their guns can be confiscated.

“The Colorado state legislature has been very busy on the gun front over the past half-dozen years or so,” said Kristin Goss, a Duke University public policy professor who studies gun politics. “Colorado is now pretty comparable to some of the strictest gun law states in the country."

Duran rejected the suggestion that any of those laws infringe on individual rights. As a concealed-carry permit holder herself, she said it’s her “duty” as a lawmaker and a gun owner to show what responsible ownership looks like.

“I don’t ever feel like anything that I have supported or run is an infringement on my rights as a gun owner,” Duran said. “I feel like it’s part of my responsibility as a gun owner to make sure that I pass legislation and support things that make our community safer.”

Gov. Jared Polis is "proud" of the gun laws and has called the state a "model for common-sense reform," his spokesperson, Shelby Wieman, said.

In the first six months of this year alone, more than 2,000 firearm transactions were denied through background checks, for reasons that include past assault convictions, restraining orders, traffic offenses and more, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

"The laws Gov. Polis has signed promote responsible gun ownership, respect Second Amendment rights, give more tools to law enforcement, help to get illegal firearms off our streets, and have undoubtedly made our state more safe," Wieman wrote in a statement to The Denver Post. "These measures, along with many others, have helped reduce crime rates in our communities and we look forward to ensuring those trends continue."

Polis was elected governor as part of the 2018 wave. But he's also shown more restraint than some Democrats when it comes to firearm laws. He balked at an initial version of SB-3 this year that would have outright banned the sale of semiautomatic weapons that have detachable magazines. His office negotiated the allowance for prospective buyers to take training courses.

'More and more restrictive'

The view from reform advocates that the laws enforce responsible gun ownership clashes against that of gun-rights advocates, who see the flurry of legislation as a fast-and-furious construction of new barriers to legal gun ownership.

Most gun owners want to comply with the law, said Ray Elliott, the president of the Colorado State Shooting Association. Gun locks, training, waiting periods and the new excise tax each add barriers -- whether it’s cost or time -- to gun ownership.

“All those rules and laws and everything going on make (gun ownership) more and more onerous, more and more restrictive,” Elliott said. “And as you put up barriers like that, (gun control advocates) know exactly what they’re doing. Less and less people are going to jump through the hoops.”

His view is shared by Collins, the gun store owner, who's also the vice president of the Colorado Federal Firearms Licensee Association. On a recent weekday afternoon, a clerk at his store was walking a potential customer through rules for transferring firearms and how to comply with the law. Collins said training is constant to keep clerks abreast of changes in law and new guidance as the store tries to stay on the right side of new regulations.

The new excise tax, in particular, has been a problem, Collins said. He called the law vague in defining which gun parts and accessories the tax applies to, putting him at risk of either overcharging customers or undercollecting the tax. The tax is also driving some customers out of state for certain items because they find them cheaper to buy online and pay a fee needed to transfer possession of the gun.

State Sen. Byron Pelton, a Sterling Republican, said he sees that problem acutely.

His sprawling northeastern Colorado district touches three other states: Nebraska, Kansas and Wyoming. All have distinctly more lenient firearm laws than Colorado. Consituents will cross the border for ammunition, in particular, to avoid the added cost of the excise tax.

"The state of Colorado is forcing more people to go out of state to buy guns, because the laws are so draconian,” Pelton said. “It's making it harder and harder and more expensive for folks in rural Colorado to buy firearms to protect themselves and their land and their livestock."

Elliott didn’t doubt that many who support the recent gun laws were sincere in trying to make people safer. But he also sees an overall movement toward disarmament. He called it “a death by a thousand cuts.”

His group sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this year highlighting the laws they find most detestable. The letter was signed by elected Republican officials across the state.

Collins' business does offer firearm training -- he said he's trained more than 15,000 students -- but he argues it should be optional. Making it a requirement infringes on gun owners' rights under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, he said.

Collins estimates that SB-3, when it goes into effect, will impact nearly 80% of his inventory, including AR-15-type rifles -- one of the most popular styles of sport-shooting rifles in the country. The weapon is also commonly associated with some of the worst mass shootings in the country, including in Colorado, though handguns are more frequently used for such attacks.

"I do see people that will want to exercise their rights and are going to stay here in Colorado," Collins said. "I do see people that are just not going to put up with it."

As the new limit on semiautomatic sales nears a year from now, barring any successful lawsuits to prevent it, “I don’t expect anything to be left on my shelves,” Collins said. He expects a surge in sales similar to ones he recalls during the COVID-19 pandemic, before he opened his brick-and-mortar store, and after President Barack Obama was elected, which prompted worries by some people about national restrictions on guns and ammo.

Collins is cautious about how he'll restock as the new law goes into effect. He doesn’t want to get left with inventory he can’t sell.

But advocates and the gun industry have long predicted doom because of new gun laws, said Sen. Tom Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat and a sponsor of many of Colorado’s new gun laws, and “none of that is true.” Sullivan's son, Alex, was one of a dozen people murdered in the Aurora theater shooting. Seventy others were injured.

Alex's murder spurred Sullivan to advocate for stricter gun laws in Colorado and nationally, and led to him running for office.

SB-3 does prohibit the sale of many semiautomatic weapons -- unless the purchaser has completed a firearm education course. The bill was heavily amended while it made its way through the legislature and Sullivan now describes it as a “permit-to-purchase” law.

People who follow the law haven’t lost access to anything in recent years -- and won’t under this law, Sullivan said. But laws need to change as society changes, he said. Sullivan likened the new gun laws to the shift toward widespread adoption of seatbelts in cars a few generations ago. It didn’t happen overnight, but the life-saving devices are now the norm.

"OK, you've got to wait a few days to get (a gun). Or you have to fill out another form. Whatever it is, you still get what you want,” Sullivan said.

But do the laws work?

One of the 2021 gun laws championed by Sullivan created the state Office of Gun Violence Prevention to, among other things, track gun deaths in Colorado. And in raw and per-capita numbers, they’ve risen overall since 2013.

In 2014, the first full year of the post-Aurora laws, the state reported 86 gun homicides, or 1.9 per 100,000 people; in 2023, the most recent year with available data, 237 people were killed with guns in homicides, or about 5 per 100,000 residents. 

In that same time frame, the number of gun suicides grew from 527 a year, or 9.9 per 100,000 people, to 673, or 11.5 per 100,000 people.

Gun-rights advocates are quick to point to such numbers, as well as the overall pandemic-era spike in violent crime, as evidence that the laws are, at best, misguided. At worst, they see the crime and violence being used as a cover to disarm law-abiding citizens.

“I don't think it's true that every single law that was passed was necessarily pointless and useless. Many are, but not all," said David B. Kopel, the research director of the Independence Institute, a libertarian-conservative think tank in Denver. He's also a senior fellow at the Firearms Research Center in the University of Wyoming's College of Law.

He said some laws have a reasonable premise, even if the data itself or their implementation leaves an open question about their efficacy and overall consequences. 

The gun issue is also so fraught and caught up in the culture wars that Kopel sees "a tremendous amount of motivated reasoning, on both sides," as those arguing seek to confirm preexisting beliefs.

Gauging the effectiveness of laws means disentangling them from broader societal changes and weighing them against the costs they impose on other people. The waiting period law, for example, may stop some suicides, but it also "makes society more dangerous," he argues, because people can't defend themselves.

Goss, the Duke University professor, likewise points out the lack of good, specific evidence on the effects of new laws on gun violence. Regional differences in history, culture and society can lead to the same laws having different effects.

But the field of study is starting to change. The Rand Corporation recently published a review of studies on gun violence that, while not drawing firm conclusions, highlighted the strength of evidence for certain laws. Broadly, the review shows that stricter laws may decrease gun violence -- but it also finds hard evidence of that may be slim. Its review of studies on waiting periods, for example, found “moderate” evidence that the laws had helped minimize suicide and violent crime.

“There’s pretty suggestive evidence that at the aggregate level, if you have a good set of laws and they’re enforced, there will be a reduction in people misusing firearms,” Goss said. “But we need much better research on that.”

Gun-rights advocates argue that root causes, not guns, should be the focus. If legislators want to address suicide, they should push for programs to support mental health; if it's crime, go after criminals. 

"Criminals, they're just going to have a little bit further to drive in order to get a firearm that they want to use in a bad way," Collins said. He added that high-end precision weapons from stores like his aren't usually the weapons used in violence. It's cheap, stolen firearms. 

He also cited the June 1 attack on demonstrators in Boulder as evidence that people intent on harming others will find a way. Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the man accused of carrying out the attack with homemade firebombs, wounded more than a dozen people, including a woman who died later. He is an immigrant who was denied a gun purchase earlier in the year because he lacked proper legal status.

Duran and Sullivan both pointed out that the pandemic upended society both in terms of crime statistics and gun sales. Wieman, the governor's spokesperson, noted that violent crime and property crime both dropped by more than 13% between 2022 and 2024.

Duran says those numbers and other data are worth reexamining to determine what more needs to be done regarding gun safety and new laws.

She also remains confident that the laws have had a positive effect. In her view, even one life saved because of the laws still matters.

"There isn't a magic wand out there," Duran said. "There just isn't. What it takes is combining neighborhoods and community with the advocates and the experts -- all of us together to say, 'What does the data show us and what do we need to do next to make a difference?' "

Colorado's undeniable shift

Twelve years ago, in the wake of the Aurora shooting, it wasn’t clear if Colorado would continue to stiffen its gun laws or not.

Rhonda Fields, who sponsored the magazine limit law in 2013 and is now an Arapahoe County commissioner, said the gun laws passed that year “created shockwaves across the state.” The package also included a law requiring universal background checks and a fee to cover those checks.

Lawmakers faced recalls and threats, including by one man who was arrested for sending Fields harassing messages. Democrats lost control of the state Senate and at least one company, firearm magazine manufacturer Magpul, left the state in protest.

Democrats spent the next several years playing defense, said Sullivan, who was not a legislator then. The state had followed a similar pattern after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre: An unbearable tragedy led to a burst of energy around firearm laws, and then quiet.

The impasse on legislation started to break in 2018, along with Colorado’s purple reputation. Duran, like Sullivan, was part of a wave of incoming Democrats who won office that year to take control of state government.

She recalled walking into the Capitol intent on creating new requirements for concealed-carry laws -- and being told no by Democratic leadership. They already had plans for a new gun bill in the 2019 session, and they wouldn’t wager majority control more than that, Duran said.

That bill was the now-enacted red-flag law. Despite protests over it, Democrats would go on to keep their majorities in the 2020 election. And in the 2022 election. And in 2024.

Backers of stricter gun laws took it as a sign that the people wanted reform.

“You can’t talk about the national gun safety movement without talking about Colorado,” Everytown for Gun Safety President John Feinblatt said. “A decade ago, no one saw progress like this coming from a state known for hunting and sport shooting."

His group ranks states based on how it rates the relative strength of their gun laws.

"Colorado has the 10th-strongest gun laws in the country," Feinblatt said, "and its lawmakers aren’t just running on gun safety -- they’re winning.”

But everyday gun owners end up bearing the brunt of the new laws, said Elliott, from the shooting association.

"Responsible gun owners are not the problem," Elliott said. "(The state is) literally passing laws on people that are very, very law-abiding citizens."

Among current and former lawmakers, Fields, whose son was murdered in a shooting in 2005, said it’s “amazing” how far the state has come; she left the legislature after she was term-limited from running again in 2024. Sullivan, likewise, said he “can’t overemphasize the thankfulness” he and others in the community of people affected by gun violence feel for the new laws Colorado has passed.

But he also called for another shift in thinking. He pointed out that education, climate change, the budget and other key state priorities all have periodic check-ins to see how those laws are working. Why not gun laws?

He’s asked legislative staff to seek more information on firearm thefts to see if policy can be tailored to the problem. Rafts of thefts from cars, homes or stores could all need different solutions. He also questioned why laws against attempts to make unlawful purchases of firearms weren’t used against the alleged Boulder firebomber.

Large Democratic majorities make it relatively easy to pass splashy gun legislation and for his colleagues to collect bill signing pens, Sullivan said, but that doesn’t replace the day-to-day policy work.

He also acknowledged that his circumstances are different from others' in the legislature.

"Everyone else has the opportunity to move on from what happened on July 20,” Sullivan said, referring to the date of the Aurora theater massacre. “They get to remember the tragedy and put it back on a shelf, and then wait another year to remember it again. For me, it’s there every single day. It changes you. It gives you a different perspective on things."

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Starting next summer, Coloradans will have to pass a background check and a training course before they can purchase a swath of semiautomatic firearms that include most of the guns known colloquially as assault weapons. Senate Bill 3 also prohibits the sale of bump stocks and rapid-fire trigger activators, which are firearm components that can increase a gun’s rate of fire.

The bill’s sponsors said it was intended to prevent future mass shootings and enforce the state’s existing prohibition on high-capacity magazines.

“We have been able to add to the safety of each and every Coloradan, especially when it comes to gun violence,” said Sen. Tom Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Julie Gonzales and Reps. Meg Froelich and Andy Boesenecker.

SB-3, which passed the legislature late last month, becomes the most sweeping gun-control measure passed by legislative Democrats in Colorado, and its passage into law was cheered Thursday by national gun-control groups Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety.

Though the law doesn’t impose a complete ban on assault weapons or any type of firearm, it follows in the footsteps of previous attempts in the Capitol to fully prohibit the sale or purchase of those guns. A group of activists, including local students who’d repeatedly come to the state Capitol calling for tighter regulations, attended the bill signing in the governor’s office Thursday.

Before the bill was signed, Froelich referred to those students as the “lockdown generation” that has lived their “whole school lives in the shadow of gun violence.”

“Today’s victory is because of the countless students that showed up day after day to testify in support of this life-saving bill,” Grant Cramer, a gun violence survivor and the co-president of Denver East High School’s Students Demand Action chapter, said in a statement. “We refused to take no for an answer and now we’ve strengthened our gun safety laws in Colorado. This is proof that our voices hold power to create change, no matter how big or small.”

Ian Escalante, the executive director of the group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, called the bill’s passage into law “one of the most disgraceful things that’s ever been done in the state.” After the bill had drawn national attention from gun-rights advocates in recent weeks, the National Rifle Association quickly put out a blistering statement criticizing Polis’ decision to sign it.

Escalante said his group was considering legal options to challenge the bill — though they likely won’t be able to pursue litigation until the bill goes into effect next year. He also said he planned to pursue “electoral accountability” in 2026, referring to challenging Democrats in competitive districts.

“We’re not going to let this law stand,” he said outside the governor’s office, “whether it’s through litigation or whether we kick these bastards out and we replace them with people who will repeal it.”

Law doesn’t apply to common handguns

The new law goes into effect Aug. 1, 2026. It applies primarily to gas-operated semiautomatic firearms that accept detachable magazines, a definition that includes the AR-15 rifle and many guns like it. It would require people pass background checks from their county sheriff. Should they clear that, they would need to take either a four- or 12-hour training course, depending on whether they’ve passed a hunter safety class.

Polis said Thursday that he wanted to keep the cost of background checks and training to below $200 per person and that he wanted additional carveouts for people who’d previously been trained with the weapons.

The law does not prohibit the possession of the weapons. It does not apply to most common handguns or shotguns, and lawmakers included a list of other firearms that are exempt from the limitations. The law also would not require anyone to turn in their firearms.

Gun shops can also continue selling firearms covered under the law, even to people who haven’t passed background checks, so long as the weapons have been altered to have a fixed magazine — meaning that they cannot be reloaded as rapidly.

All of the legislature’s 34 Republican lawmakers — along with several Democrats — voted against the bill. Conservatives labeled it an infringement on the Second Amendment and argued it would do little to stop gun violence.

Opponents delivered thousands of petitions to Democrats and to Polis’ office requesting that the proposal be rejected, and some also left flyers at the homes of Democratic lawmakers.

A skeptic of previous proposals to ban firearms at the state level, Sullivan embraced SB-3 as a means to enforce the 2013 magazine ban passed after the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, in which Sullivan’s son, Alex, was killed. Other advocates and supporters said the bill seeks to prevent the mass shootings that have become a common feature of American life.

The new law’s limitations would apply to the guns used in the Aurora attack as well as to the weapons used at Columbine High School in 1999, at the Boulder King Soopers in 2021, and in a shooting spree in Lakewood and Denver in late 2021.

Polis sought changes to bill

As initially drafted, the bill would’ve broadly banned the sale or purchase of any gas-operated gun that accepted detachable magazines — which simultaneously would’ve escalated the magazine ban and enacted a de facto ban on most existing assault weapons.

But Polis balked, and his staff sought to insert a loophole into the measure allowing for sales to continue under certain circumstances.

In a late-night deal, Sullivan and Gonzales eventually acquiesced to the governor’s request. They added in the training and background check requirements after a needed supporter — embattled then-Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis — was absent ahead of a key vote.

In a statement accompanying the bill signing, Polis focused largely on the changes inserted into the bill to allow the firearms to still be sold to people who complete SB-3’s training and background check requirements.

“This bill ensures that our Second Amendment rights are protected and that Coloradans can continue to purchase the gun of their choice for sport, hunting, self defense, or home defense,” he wrote.

With SB-3, Colorado joins a growing list of states that have either instituted a permitting scheme — meaning requirements that people receive some sort of approval before they can purchase certain weapons — or an outright ban on semiautomatic rifles.

The law will almost certainly be challenged in court, though legal scholars and supporters have argued it stands on solid constitutional footing.

Legislative Democrats have enacted a growing list of firearms regulations, largely in the past few years as the party’s legislative majorities have grown. Sullivan said 40 gun-violence prevention bills have been introduced in recent years, nearly half of which have passed.

Those new laws include a mandatory waiting period and age limit for purchasing firearms, new gun-storage rules and additional gun shop licensing requirements. Lawmakers have also further limited where firearms can be carried and have expanded the legal avenues for a court to temporarily confiscate a person’s weapons.

After signing SB-3 on Thursday, Polis then signed another Sullivan-backed bill intended to help bring federal funding to the state to respond to mass shootings.

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Senate Bill 3 — which would apply the new restrictions to the gun used in the Boulder attack — passed the House 36-28 on Monday. The bill’s Senate sponsors next will move to accept changes made in the House and then send the bill to Gov. Jared Polis.

The governor is expected to sign the measure. At Polis’ behest, lawmakers agreed to weaken the bill’s initial intent of fully banning the sale or purchase of the targeted weapons, unless they were altered to have a fixed magazine — meaning that they could not be reloaded as rapidly.

Still, the measure represents the strongest gun-control legislation passed by Colorado lawmakers since they began undertaking firearm regulation in earnest more than a decade ago.

The bill, which would take effect Aug. 1, 2026, broadly would prohibit the sale, purchase or transfer of gas-operated, semiautomatic firearms that accept detachable magazines — a definition that captures most firearms colloquially known as assault weapons.

Under the bill, the guns could still be purchased by people who’ve passed a background check and completed a training course. The legislation does not ban the possession of any weapon, and it would not apply to common pistols and shotguns. It also exempts a list of common guns, some of which are used for hunting.

The restrictions would apply to the gas-operated pistol used by the King Soopers shooter in March 2021. It would also cover the weapons used in the December 2021 Lakewood and Denver shooting spree; the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting; and some of those used in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.

The bill’s sponsors — Democratic Reps. Andy Boesenecker and Meg Froelich — said the bill regulates weapons with a “unique lethality” that have been used in mass shootings across Colorado and the United States.

“A generation after Columbine — (a time) of active shooter drills, of lived experience of mass shootings — you bet I have emotions,” Froelich, an Englewood legislator in her final term, said before the vote Monday. “I’m heartbroken. I’m also determined.”

“The core root of the issue”

Republicans uniformly opposed the bill in the House and the Senate. On Monday, House Republicans questioned the measure’s constitutionality and its usefulness, and they said the law wouldn’t be followed by the people most likely to commit violent crimes.

“Deal with violence,” said Rep. Anthony Hartsook, a Parker Republican. “… The tool that is used is an extension of that violence. Until you address the crimes and the people and the mental health that’s dealing with (violence), you’re not going to get to the core root of the issue.”

SB-3 is the product of months — and, in some ways, years — of debate, negotiation and broader political shifts, all against a backdrop of seemingly ceaseless mass shootings. After two years of failed attempts to pass assault weapons bans, lawmakers introduced the measure in early January with a different approach: banning the sale of many guns that accept detachable magazines.

It’s sponsored by Sen. Tom Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat whose son, Alex, died in the Aurora theater shooting. Sullivan had opposed the previous attempts at more explicit assault weapons bans, but he provided pivotal support for SB-3. He cast it as a way to ratchet up enforcement of the state’s high-capacity magazine ban — which lawmakers passed after the theater shooting.

When the bill was introduced, it had enough House and Senate co-sponsors to clear both chambers. But Polis sought a loophole, a desire enabled by a group of holdout Senate Democrats and the absence of a would-be supporter, then-Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis, for the vote.

After acceding to the training and background check changes, Sullivan and co-sponsor Sen. Julie Gonzales shepherded the bill out of the Senate. It was then heavily amended in the House, largely to cut costs in a tight budget year.

Once the Senate’s sponsors accept the House’s changes, the bill goes to Polis. Earlier this month, Polis said he was “confident the improvements made to the bill will … protect our Second Amendment rights here in Colorado and improve the education and gun-safety knowledge of gun owners.”

Significant new gun regulation

Should Polis sign it, SB-3 would be a cornerstone of Colorado’s growing foundation of gun control legislation, and its passage shows just how far the state has moved in the last decade.

In 2013, Democratic lawmakers passed a package of gun-control bills, including the magazine ban. That prompted a successful campaign to recall two Democratic legislators, which then chilled additional gun legislation.

That attitude has changed as voters have increasingly sent Democrats to the statehouse. Those Democrats have grown more comfortable pursuing firearm regulation in a state plagued by mass shootings.

In the past several years, the state has adopted age limits, waiting periods, storage requirements, state permitting for gun sales, and a red-flag law allowing for the temporary removal of a person’s firearms.

Still, SB-3 prompted extensive and heated debate in both chambers, including for several hours before the final vote Monday.

The state’s history of mass shootings was also omnipresent: In response to Republican criticism that the bill would limit “law-abiding citizens” from purchasing firearms, Denver Democratic Rep. Jennifer Bacon read the names of people killed in schools and grocery stores.

Each of them, she said, was a law-abiding citizen who “died of the crime of mass shooting.”

“I want us to recognize,” she said, “that we can prevent the crime of mass murder by gun.”

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Anne Marie Hochhalter, a 17-year-old senior at Columbine when she was shot in the spine by two deranged classmates, died this week at 43 possibly from complications with the injuriesshe sustained that tragic day. She outlived 12 of her schoolmates and a teacher who died April 20, 1999. Austin Eubanks, who was shot twice, died at 37 following a long battle with an opioid addiction that was a result of the shooting. Both are survived by Richard Castaldo, Patrick Ireland and Sean Graves who also were severely wounded and have continued to honor the legacy of those who died at Columbine.

After Columbine, there was a mass movement for change. Hope was palpable that this would never happen again. Police reviewed mistakes they made in delaying their entry into the building. Laws were changed so that the shooters would not have been able to get their guns in Colorado legally. A hotline was established for students, parents and teachers to report threats, which has prevented some plotted attacks. And Coloradans united around the survivors and their families.

Columbine High School shooting survivor dies decades after tragedy. Her tenacious spirit is remembered.

But then the mass shootings continued – at schools, at concerts, at offices, and at parades. The pace began to pick up sometime in the last decade. Some shootings were orchestrated by foreign entities as terrorist attacks, but most were home-grown Americans slaughtering their friends, neighbors, and sometimes complete strangers with a bloodthirst that is unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t seen armed combat in war.

Also, this week, street signs on C-470 were finally updated to reflect the change of Lucent Boulevard to honor Kendrick Castillo. Kendrick was killed during the 2019 Highlands Ranch school shooting. He threw himself on one of the gunmen, saving the lives of his classmates, but suffering a fatal wound in the process. Now Kendrick Castillo Way reminds us all of a teenager who shouldn't have had to be a hero in his high school classroom but sacrificed himself to save others.

His parents visited his grave every day for five years.

Sadly, these tragedies have divided the nation, and little hope remains that there will be an end to the violence.

Some survivors have dedicated their lives to preventing more ripples from forming, only to be accused of being un-American because of the politics and rights that envelop guns. In Colorado, Sen. Tom Sullivan’s son was killed in the Aurora Theater shooting. He sponsored a bill that passed the Colorado Senate that will make it harder for people to buy semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines, like the one used to kill Sullivan’s son, Alex Sullivan, and 11 others at a midnight screening of Dark Knight Rises in 2012.

Perhaps instead of derision, Sullivan should be met with compassion as he seeks to protect others from gun violence.

Families who have lost their children at school shootings now support one another through an informal network, but part of the toll taken by these mass shootings has been the suicides that follow -- Anne Marie Hochhalter’s mother shot herself just as the family was moving into a new house that would be accessible for Anne Marie, Jeremy Richman killed himself after his son was killed at Newtown Elementary School, and two teen survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting killed themselves in 2019.

The trauma and loss was insurmountable for some.

But somehow Anne Marie Hochhalter endured. She thrived and lived her life well. She loved her animals, her friends and the ocean, which she only got to visit once.

“She was fiercely independent,” Sue Townsend told The Denver Post. “She was a fighter. She’d get knocked down -- she struggled a lot with health issues that stemmed from the shooting — but I’d watch her pull herself back up. She was her best advocate and an advocate for others who weren’t as strong in the disability community.”

Townsend's stepdaughter Lauren Townsend was killed at Columbine and said she "acquired" Anne Marie as a daughter in the aftermath of the shooting and Anne Marie's mother's suicide.

Perhaps there is still hope that Americans can unite and stop new ripples of trauma and loss from consuming so much that is good in this world.

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The measure would cover a large swath of guns that are colloquially known as assault weapons. Senate Bill 3 passed the Senate’s State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee on a party-line, 3-2 vote after eight hours of testimony in a packed room in the state Capitol.

The measure now heads to the full Senate, where its passage is virtually assured. Eighteen votes are needed to clear the 35-seat chamber, and 18 Democrats — not including a newly appointed senator who voted for the bill Tuesday night — have already signed on as co-sponsors.

From there, the bill will head to the House, where it has similar levels of support.

The bill’s sponsors, Democratic Sens. Tom Sullivan and Julie Gonzales, argued that it was the next step in enforcing Colorado’s 11-year-old ban on high-capacity magazines.

Sullivan, whose son, Alex, was killed in the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, said the magazine ban has been ignored, thus requiring lawmakers to pursue a ban on the sale or transfer of firearms that accept the components. The measure would also ban rapid-fire trigger activators and bump stocks, which increase the fire rate of weapons.

Marking a novel approach to limiting gun sales, SB-3 would not cover common shotguns, revolvers or pistols, unless they are gas-operated. It also would not make it illegal to possess semiautomatic weapons that accept detachable magazines.

The measure would essentially require gun manufacturers to modify semiautomatic rifles to have fixed magazines that must be loaded, round by round, from the top of the weapon, rather than through magazines that can be easily swapped out when bullets run out.

“This is an enforcement of the high-capacity magazine ban,” Sullivan said before the vote. “Something that we should have been working on since 2013, but we didn’t. And it took 11 years for us to get back on it and do something about it. That’s what we’re doing today. This is the next step forward. And then we’ll see where we go from here.”

For hours Tuesday, supporters and opponents took turns defending and railing against the proposal.

East High School students recalled the shootings and lockdowns on their campus in recent years, while local and national advocates for gun control groups defended the bill’s legality and workability.

The specter of Colorado’s — and America’s — grim and steady drumbeat of mass shootings was also ever-present Tuesday: Two supporters said they were alumni of Virginia Tech, the site of a 2007 shooting that left 32 people dead. Some supporters testified about shopping at the Boulder King Soopers where 10 people were killed by a shooter in 2021.

Jane Dougherty, whose sister was killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, testified about receiving her sister’s cleaned clothing in a box.

“We sanitize it because we don’t want to see it,” said Dougherty, who has testified in favor of past Colorado bills that were attempts at more overt bans on so-called assault weapons. “But we have to see it. We have to see what high-capacity magazines will do to your family members.”

The bill was opposed by Republicans, gun-rights advocacy groups and gun store owners. Firearms dealers warned that the ban would push them out of business.

JD Murphree of Triple J Armory said it would “devastate” gun stores. Gun- rights groups pledged to sue — a threat they have pursued, to mixed results, on recent gun-control bills.

Sen. Rod Pelton, a Cheyenne Wells Republican, said the measure was unconstitutional and violated the Second Amendment. Several opponents also accused the legislature of essentially seeking to ban all semiautomatic rifles.

“A gun ban by another name is still a gun ban,” Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams told the committee.

Sullivan denied that SB-3 was an assault weapons ban, and he said he didn’t support such a policy. Indeed, he said he’d essentially killed attempts by fellow Democrats over the past two years to pass a more explicit ban.

Governor’s position unclear

A Centennial Democrat, Sullivan is largely seen as the legislature’s de facto point-person on gun legislation. His backing of this latest iteration — coupled with more overt support in both chambers — means the bill is likely to pass and reach Gov. Jared Polis’ desk.

Polis’ position on the measure is unclear; a spokeswoman did not immediately return a message seeking comment Wednesday morning.

A potential snag comes from the bill’s estimated cost: The Colorado Bureau of Investigation projects that the bill would cost $4.6 million to implement — a hefty price tag in a session when the legislature faces a $700 million budget hole.

But a nonpartisan fiscal analyst working for the legislature essentially rejected that estimate and said there would be no cost to the state. Sullivan also criticized the CBI’s estimates, and he accused the agency of “fluffing” the numbers, potentially on behalf of a leery Polis, to make it easier to set the bill aside.

High financial projections are often a quiet kiss of death for legislation, and lawmakers have long griped that the estimates can be artificially inflated to sideline bills. Sullivan noted that the CBI’s estimate included the need for several $90,000 microscopes and a remodeling of one of the agency’s labs.

Shortly before the committee vote, Sullivan said he was undaunted by the opposition seated behind him, adding that he wished more firearms dealers and gunowners had sought out proactive conversations before.

“When I got myself here, I made sure that we’re going to have these kinds of conversations every single year while I am here — while people in my district vote for me and bring me here, while I beat back recalls against me for what I think is the right thing to do,” Sullivan said. “So we’ll keep having these conversations, and I welcome these conversations. Because we’re going down the right path with this.”

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The new bill spearheaded by Democrats is aimed at building upon existing gun laws by prohibiting the sale, manufacture or purchase of semiautomatic weapons that use detachable magazines. It is set to be introduced in the early days of the legislative session, which begins Wednesday.

Detachable magazines feed ammunition into the gun and can be swapped out when empty. The measure would also ban rapid-fire trigger activators and bump stocks, which are components that increase the fire rate of semiautomatic rifles and were infamously used in America’s deadliest mass shooting, in Las Vegas in 2017.

The bill, sponsored by Centennial Democrat Sen. Tom Sullivan, would not prohibit possession of the targeted firearms, and anyone who possessed the weapons before a ban went into effect could keep them. The measure would level criminal penalties — as well as the loss of licensure — against sellers who violated it.

Sullivan cast the bill as a way to enforce the state’s 11-year-old ban on high-capacity magazines — which, he said, are still sold in Colorado despite the prohibition. The components were used in both the Boulder King Soopers shooting and the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, Sullivan said.

“So instead of walking into the King Soopers with multiple magazines that (the shooter) just switched out and kept on firing, he would either have to stop and manually reload, which gives law enforcement and the public the ability to take some kind of an action … or he would have to walk in there with multiple AR-style weapons with attached magazines,” said Sullivan, whose son, Alex,  was killed in the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, in an interview.

The proposal is not a ban on certain semiautomatic rifles referred to as assault weapons, though its parameters would prohibit the sale of a wide swath of high-powered guns colloquially considered to be in that category. Sullivan has previously opposed efforts by Democratic lawmakers to ban assault weapons at the state level, and one such attempt passed the House before dying in the Senate last spring.

Sullivan reiterated his opposition to a state-level assault weapons ban, though he said he supported a nationwide prohibition.

Those types of firearms could still be sold under his bill, albeit in different form: If manufacturers and gun owners want to continue selling and using the weapons, Sullivan said, they would need to adjust to firearms that can only be loaded slowly, bullet by bullet, from the top of the weapon — not through detachable magazines.

Sullivan criticized firearm manufacturers and dealers for continuing to sell high-capacity magazines in the state, and he questioned why law enforcement had not done more to proactively crack down on their sale. The effort to ban bump stocks comes after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Trump administration ban on the components, which drew national scrutiny after the Las Vegas mass shooter fired more than 1,000 bullets in 11 minutes in 2017.

The proposal does not cover standard handguns or shotguns, though the prohibition would include the type of pistol used in the Boulder King Soopers shooting that left 10 people dead in March 2021.

The bill is a new approach to limiting the type of high-powered weapons frequently used in mass shootings, which have become a grimly frequent occurrence in Colorado and in America. While other states have banned certain semiautomatic rifles outright, Sullivan said a similar expansion of a magazine ban hasn’t been used elsewhere.

It also represents the latest step of years of Colorado Democrats’ attempts to better regulate gun sales. Last year, lawmakers passed a bill to require that gun dealers hold a state license, on top of the existing federal requirement. (Gun dealers who sell weapons prohibited by Sullivan’s bill could lose their state license if it becomes law.) Legislators also directed additional money to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to better investigate illegal sales of guns and gun components.

The new bill will be co-sponsored by Democratic Reps. Andrew Boesenecker and Meg Froelich. Boesenecker co-sponsored the state licensure bill last year, while Froelich and Sullivan backed the measure to increase the investigative bureau’s budget to pursue illegal gun sales.

“What we’re able to recognize pretty clearly is that particular kinds of firearms, when paired with a high-capacity magazine, have a lethality that are just unparalleled,” Boesenecker said.

The Capitol’s minority Republicans, who have uniformly opposed gun control bills in recent years, almost certainly will oppose the measure. Republican lawmakers have railed against previous legislation, including the more sweeping assault weapons ban proposals, as government overreach and infringements on the Second Amendment.

On Friday, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners executive director Ian Escalante said his group is “absolutely going to oppose this bill,” which he argued violated the U.S. Constitution. He said the organization will probably file a lawsuit challenging it, should it pass.

“Realistically, you might as well try to ban these firearms,” he said, referring to Sullivan’s bill as a de facto ban on the weapons. “All manufacturers are going to have to remanufacture these firearms and make them with fixed magazines. I don’t know how that would work.”

Sullivan noted that Colorado voters in November passed a new tax on gun and ammunition sales — which, he argued, showed voters’ priorities.

“The people of the state of Colorado have mandated that our legislators do something about the public health crisis that is gun violence, and that’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “It’d be great if we had partners in that from the minority party, from the industry. I haven’t seen that (yet), going on my seventh year down here at the General Assembly.”

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Michael Hawkins, 55, was charged July 29 with six felony counts of sexual assault of a child by a person in a position of trust and a single count of misdemeanor child abuse in alleged incidents that spanned from 2002 to 2021, court records show.

He is accused of raping an elementary-aged girl, groping multiple children, using “arrest control tactics” that physically hurt them and, in one instance, holding a boy underwater until he nearly drowned, according to an affidavit filed against him.

The Denver Post does not identify victims of sexual abuse and is not identifying how Hawkins came in contact with the children in order to protect their privacy. The abuse is not alleged to have happened while Hawkins was on duty as an officer with the Aurora Police Department.

Hawkins “adamantly denies the accusations,” his attorney, Christopher Estoll, said Tuesday.

“Mr. Hawkins has been cooperative and in communication with the prosecution throughout the investigation, but adamantly denies the accusations,” Estoll said. “The legal process will provide him with the opportunity to present additional information related to these allegations in the future.”

Estoll declined further comment, but wrote in an Aug. 1 court filing that at least one of the people bringing accusations was “not a credible witness and is highly manipulative.”

“Mr. Hawkins is presumed innocent and should not be preemptively punished by being kept in custody,” Estoll wrote in the brief, seeking a personal recognizance bond for Hawkins. A judge granted a $50,000 bond.

The brief also notes that the criminal investigation began in 2022 but charges were not filed until July, and that Hawkins has no prior criminal history. He does not pose a threat to public safety, Estoll wrote.

A spokesman for the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, Eric Ross, said Tuesday that prosecutors did not believe they could prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt when the affidavit against Hawkins was first authored in 2022, but that further investigation changed that.

“Once we had what we needed and we felt we had a case, then charges were formally filed,” he said.

The allegations span Hawkins’ tenure in the Aurora Police Department between 2005 and 2018, and multiple witnesses and victims told investigators that Hawkins’ job as a police officer impacted his behavior.

The former police sergeant experienced post-traumatic stress disorder after he responded to the 2012 mass shooting at an Aurora movie theater in which 12 people were killed and 70 wounded, according to an affidavit filed against him. He received national attention in the wake of that attack when he testified during the shooter’s jury trial about carrying a dying 6-year-old girl out of the theater that night.

The rape of the elementary-aged girl is alleged to have happened around 2012, but it is not clear from court records whether it allegedly occurred before or after the theater shooting. One person interviewed by police said Hawkins “claimed all of his issues were related to the theater shooting,” but that, in reality, “many of the issues existed beforehand,” according to the affidavit.

Hawkins made headlines again in 2017 when a woman brought a police brutality lawsuit against him and the Aurora Police Department over a 2015 incident in which Hawkins and three other officers tackled, punched and kicked the unarmed woman, then falsely charged her with assaulting police.

Video of the incident showed Hawkins stomping on the woman’s head while she was being held on the ground by three other officers. The assault charges against her were dropped and Aurora paid $335,000 to settle the lawsuit.

Hawkins medically retired from the Aurora Police Department in January 2018.

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It’s no secret how the longtime Denver Post reporter earned himself the nickname Kirk “Cold Case” Mitchell following years of dedicated coverage of unsolved criminal investigations across Colorado, along with writing about the state’s most sensational murders and other mayhem.

Mitchell, who retired from The Post in 2020 after 22 years at the newspaper, died this week in Pennsylvania after battling prostate cancer since 2016. He was 64.

His byline can be found on stories about subjects ranging from the Aurora theater shooting to therapy dogs in prisons to the drug kingpin “El Chapo.”

Oldest son Vance Mitchell said his father was never afraid to meet with convicted killers or interview someone from any walk of life.

“He seemed like he approached it as helping people tell their story in their own words,” Vance Mitchell said.

Friends, former coworkers and family members were eager to return the favor, sharing Kirk Mitchell’s story in the pages his byline once graced.

Kirk’s story

Kirk Vance Mitchell Sr. was born in Peru, Indiana, where his father was stationed with the U.S. Air Force. After moving around with the service, the Mitchells settled in Keene, New York, where Kirk’s parents, who were accomplished painters, moved the family into a bed and breakfast they had bought.

The young Mitchell played football, basketball and soccer at Keene Central School, from which he graduated in 1977. Throughout his professional career, Mitchell’s resume boasted that he graduated in the Top 10 in his senior class. There were only nine students, daughter-in-law Debbie Mitchell said.

“He literally put that on all of his resumes,” she said.

After high school, Mitchell served two years in Quito, Ecuador, on his mission with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After returning, Mitchell earned his journalism degree from Brigham Young University.

Mitchell began his journalism career at the Associated Press in Salt Lake City, then worked at newspapers in Twin Falls, Idaho, and Mesa, Arizona, before joining The Post in 1998.

At The Post, Mitchell spent years as a crime reporter, covering some of the most notorious murders in Colorado, including the 2013 assassination of Colorado Department of Corrections executive director Tom Clements by a parolee who was a member of a white supremacist gang in the prison system.

Mitchell was most proud of his contributions to two of the Pulitzer Prizes won by The Post’s newsroom — the 2000 and 2013 awards in the breaking news category for coverage of the Columbine High School and Aurora movie theater massacres, respectively.

“He was a dogged reporter,” said Vikki Migoya, a former Post editor who now works as a public affairs specialist with the FBI. “He would get hold of something and dig and dig.”

Migoya noted Mitchell, who she edited while she worked at the paper, never turned down a story and would give it his all whether a short crime item, a holiday feature or a special investigation.

“He could find people that nobody else could find,” Migoya said. “If we were trying to locate someone — the subject of a lawsuit or a relative of someone we needed on the phone — Kirk was the one who would dig in and be able to find that person.”

For years, Mitchell wrote The Post’s cold case blog, which garnered some of the highest readership on the newspaper’s website. His fascination with unsolved crimes earned him the nickname “Cold Case” from his colleagues on the paper’s city desk.

“A person who spent so many years writing about crime could become hardened and cynical but that didn’t happen to Kirk,” said Lee Ann Colacioppo, The Post’s executive editor. “There was an optimism to him that you could actually see in the way his eyes twinkled and a desire for justice that found its voice in his devotion to writing about cold cases. He was a diligent and sensitive reporter and a proud and devoted father. The newsroom just felt right when he was hunched over his computer.”

Sometimes his blog posts would generate tips that would help detectives solve the crime, Vance Mitchell said.

“The thing he was most passionate about was trying to solve the mystery,” he said.

While covering so much tragedy, Kirk Mitchell was also riveted by finding the light in people.

Post photographer R.J. Sangosti recalled Mitchell repeatedly writing stories about people in prison training therapy dogs behind bars and finding joy in watching them interact with the animals.

“He was enthralled by how someone could be a cold-hearted criminal at one point of their life and, at a different point, they could share their bunk with a dog and teach it to love and care for a child with severe autism,” Sangosti said. “Kirk saw people at their worst, but somehow he always was able to find the best in that person and included that in his stories.”

Kirk Mitchell was a voracious reader, enjoying — you guessed it — mystery novels.

He authored a nonfiction book, “The Spin Doctor,” about the 2002 death of Nancy Sonnenfeld, explaining how her husband Kurt Sonnenfeld became the primary suspect before escaping to Argentina and fighting extradition back to Denver.

The Sonnenfeld case was one of many in which Mitchell was called to appear on true-crime television shows to talk about his coverage. He continued to appear on those shows even into his retirement.

Despite the sometimes difficult subject matter, Mitchell had a sense of humor about his work.

“Often we’d ask him, ‘How was work?’ And he would say, ‘Well, I was in prison,'” Vance Mitchell said. “He thought it was funny to tell people he went to prison.”

A family man

Loved ones described Mitchell as a family man, epitomized by his close companionship with his son Jonathon Mitchell, who has Down syndrome.

The two enjoyed superhero movies and Kirk Mitchell sometimes volunteered at an ARC Thrift Store in Aurora where Jonathon worked so the two could spend time together.

“Kirk was so involved with him and so proud of him,” Migoya said. “It always touched me, the relationship he had and the fact that he was so supportive of his son.”

Mitchell was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016 and fought it until his death.

He died Monday at his home in Lititz, Pennsylvania, where he lived with his wife Robin Ritchey. They married in 2022.

After retirement, Mitchell enjoyed traveling around the United States to visit his large family. He attended concerts and sporting events that his grandchildren participated in, Debbie Mitchell said.

Kirk Mitchell is survived by his wife and five children: Kirk Vance Mitchell, Jr., Jonathon James Mitchell, Jennifer Noelle Marler, Stacy Ann Amador and Michael Jensen Mitchell. He had eight grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held Saturday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The family asks that memorial donations be made to the Rocky Mountain Down Syndrome Association or the Utah Down Syndrome Foundation.

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She, too, had inched through days when all the world’s laughter went silent and its beauty was lost. In a morning fog, she’d question if it all was a nightmare, and in the black of night, when the grisly visions clawed her awake, she’d lie there wishing it was she who had died. Life became a torturous cycle punctuated by her own sobbing. She was sure she was creeping toward insanity.

Now she found herself in Newtown or Parkland or Uvalde or whatever fresh hell had just been put on the map. She had lessons to share, advice that could only be amassed by someone who’d lived through the same. So, she’d clasp the hands of the mourning and ask about the ones they’d been robbed of and mouth words that could surprise her as much as those who listened.

“You will,” she said confidently, “find joy again.”

She repeated it more times than she can count. She’d show up at the school or nightclub or church or wherever the latest battle erupted in this new American war, and she’d say them to the parents who put children in tiny caskets and the partners who never got to say goodbye. She knew them to be true even if she had to repeat them to convince herself.

It would be a journey, she told them, to rediscover happiness. A journey she was on, too.

• • •

Here is life before Phillips’ daughter was shot: She is sharing her dream house with her dream husband and has just landed her dream job. She goes to cocktail parties. She is fun to be around. Come summer, there are carefree vacations, and at year’s end, there are Christmas trees in every room. All the teenage strife that once occupied her San Antonio home has faded. Her son is suddenly a responsible adult. Her daughter has blossomed into a poised and professional woman, on the cusp of college graduation and eager to make a name for herself as a sports reporter.

And here is life after: The dream home is lost to bankruptcy. The dream job is abandoned. She and her dream husband barely want to leave the house, much less fake their way through socializing. Even her best friend of decades has tired of her gloom. There will be no vacation. There will be no Christmas. All of that ended with a middle-of-the-night call on July 20, 2012, that caused her to slide down the wall, screaming the same two words over and over.

“Jessi’s dead!” she bellowed. “Jessi’s dead!”

Just hours earlier, she’d texted back and forth with her daughter, Jessica Ghawi, the electric 24-year-old who oozed so much enthusiasm, kindness and impulsivity that she reminded her mother of a Labrador puppy. From the time she was a little girl, she was marked by her empathy, befriending the friendless and comforting the crying. She was fiery, she was silly, she was irrepressible. She sailed down a mountain dressed like a banana the first time she skied. She sweet-talked her way to the front of the airport security line when she was late for a flight. Her smile sparkled, her conversation never ended, she stopped traffic in a dress.

And now she was gone.

Details dripped out from inside the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, where Ghawi was among the dozen killed, lives ended by a man with guns he never should have had.

And, for months, Phillips sunk into a paralyzing haze.

“This really happened. This is not a dream. This is my life now,” she’d realize when she awoke.

Before, when headlines flashed of Columbine and Virginia Tech and Fort Hood and so many others, she absorbed the horror of it all for just a moment before turning away and returning to her safe and happy life. Something had to be done, she knew, but she left the task to others.

Now, it felt as if her whole identity was challenged. How could she ever again believe the idea that her country was the home of life, liberty and happiness, when her daughter’s life and her own happiness had been taken?

She felt her daughter nagging at her, not just to rise from bed day after agonizing day, but to do something more.

• • •

As the first Christmas that Phillips would not celebrate neared, another shooting erupted, this time at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. An anti-violence group reached out, asking if she might consider visiting Newtown to meet parents of the dead. She said yes and found herself in a room where she saw that familiar expression.

“We looked like that five months ago,” she said to her husband Lonnie, who had been in Jessi’s life since she was a little girl and saw her as a daughter of his own.

There, they met David Wheeler, who recalled learning of the shooting that claimed Phillips’ daughter. “Those poor people,” he thought at the time, pausing just for a moment before returning to work. Now, two of those people were before him, and he was living through the same.

Wheeler’s 6-year-old son Ben was silly, rambunctious, athletic and funny, and loved being the center of attention. He sang Beatles songs in perfect pitch and shrieked in glee whenever a lighthouse came into view. He was about to get the training wheels off his bike, about to lose his baby teeth, about to start playing soccer, about to be so many things.

Phillips held Wheeler and offered a bevy of advice. She told him to forgive himself even as his mind would trick him into thinking he could have prevented his son’s death. She told him to think of himself first and take the time to grieve before jumping into advocacy. She told him he might lose friends and be the target of conspiracy theories. She told him he’d be happy again.

Wheeler was left stunned that anyone who’d been through what Phillips had could stand before him just months later and express any sense of optimism about life.

“Not only do you wonder if you’re going to ever be happy or feel happy or find happiness ever again,” Wheeler said, “you wonder if it’s wrong to do that.”

Phillips’ very presence gave him hope. And for her, a sense of purpose was found.

• • •

For the first time since Jessi’s death, a new life crystallized. Phillips vowed to travel to as many shooting sites as she could.

She’d pin on a button with her daughter’s face and set out for whatever makeshift memorial had sprouted up. She’d pass the piles of flowers and stuffed animals and look for the photos of the lost. She felt a kinship with those whose loved ones’ lives ended like Jessi’s. When she looked into their eyes, she sensed the hopes and dreams that were snuffed out.

Often, those closest to the dead were hard to find, holing up as she once did to shut the world out. She would make her way through the community, looking for people to make introductions, or reach out directly through Facebook and phone calls.

“You don’t know me,” Phillips said when she made her way to Rhonda Hart after her daughter was killed at a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, “but I know what you’re going through.”

Hart’s 14-year-old daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was a Girl Scout through and through, who devoured books and was a model of politeness, with an occasional burst of sassiness sneaking through. When she was 3, Hart once nudged her out the door by saying, “Come on, princess.” She snapped back: “I’m not a princess, Mommy. I’m a race car.”

Kimberly loved her American Sign Language class and dreamed of being an interpreter. The last time she saw her mother, they signed “I love you” to one another.

Now Hart was in her darkest moment. She cried constantly. She couldn’t sleep. Her body hurt. Showering and changing her clothes had become optional. Nothing mattered.

On the other end of the phone was a woman who knew precisely how she felt.

“I kind of let my barriers down to talk to her,” Hart said. “And we just kind of bonded.”

Each place Phillips went, it repeated.

Always, there were vigils by candlelight and politicians with empty promises and first responders who’d seen too much. Always, there were reporters telling the same story that seemed to have been told a hundred times. Always, there was a cascade of grief.

“Every one is the same and every one is different,” Phillips said.

Some people Phillips met along the way stayed in touch for years; others dissolved into tears in her arms, never to be heard from again. Some spiraled to suicide. Some of their tragedies were seared into public consciousness; others receded into a jumble of places where something awful happened, but few seemed to remember exactly what.

Along the way, there were diversions. For months, Phillips sat in a Colorado courthouse while her daughter’s killer stood trial. She found herself in court again when she sued the seller of the guns used in the theater attack, but a law shielding gun sellers ensured it failed.

On the hook for the gun shop’s legal fees, the Phillipses lost their home.

But the journey continued. They made an RV their home and took to the road even more.

Sometimes, at the site of one tragedy, they’d cut their stay short to rush to another. Sometimes months passed between shootings. Always, they returned to the road.

People would ask, “How could you keep doing this?”

They would reply, “How could we not?”

• • •

As she pushed forward, Phillips’ hopes soared from time to time that major gun reform could happen. She went to Capitol Hill and the White House and the campaign trail to elevate the cause. There she was, beside a president or a congresswoman. There she was, again and again, not just frustrated but sickened by the country’s inability to confront the killings.

At each shooting site, she had nothing more on her agenda than reaching families of the dead and being a source of comfort and advice gleaned from her own experience. Often, though, those she met would reach out later, seeking to advocate for change the way she had.

Droves joined the cause, but the killings only continued and the political divide only widened.

Phillips didn’t consider it radical to believe weapons of war had no place on American streets. Her parents gave her a gun for her 10th birthday and she enjoyed bird hunting as a girl. She was a Texan, long aligned with Republican politics. Now, she found their intransigence on guns maddening.

“Innocent people and children are dying,” she said, “and people go, ‘Oh well, nothing we can do.’”

It became a source of pain for Phillips and those who joined her work.

Marc Orfanos received a call from Phillips within a day of his son Telemachus’ killing. The 27-year-old was one of 13 who were fatally shot at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, and he felt his cynicism and disgust grow with each shooting that followed. His son was a Navy veteran who was just beginning to recover from the trauma of surviving the shooting a year earlier that killed 60 people at a Las Vegas concert.

The loss Orfanos felt rippled to people he never met. A little boy down the street wrote him a letter saying that when he’d walk his dog at night, he felt safer when he’d see Telemachus outside. A customer at the Infiniti dealership where Telemachus worked told of how she texted back and forth with him about the Dodgers. Childhood teachers showed up, talking of his humor and how he seemed to find something in common with everyone he met.

As so many showered the family in compassion, though, others turned to vitriol.

The day after the shooting, Orfanos’ wife Susan gave a seething, voice-breaking TV interview in which she said, “I don’t want prayers, I don’t want thoughts, I want gun control.” It made the family a target and unleashed a torrent of hate. Callers dialed them at home claiming it was all a lie and their son wasn’t even dead. Letters blanketed the neighborhood saying the family was embroiled in a conspiracy to take away people’s guns. All of it came as the horrifying details of Telemachus’ death – on the floor of a bar, bleeding out from five bullet holes – tormented them.

Orfanos couldn’t find consolation in his son’s death bringing change, because it didn’t.

“One doesn’t get through it or over it or past it,” he said. “It never changes. And the reason it never changes is because there seems to be no concerted and universal effort to stop this.”

• • •

Phillips had no idea how far her trip would go or how long it would last. As it stretched on, she lost faith in politicians to do anything, and grew disenchanted with some gun reform groups, too. The only thing she could rely on was more shootings, more ripples of devastating grief.

Brandon Wolf met Phillips after he survived the shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, keeping in touch and crossing paths as their advocacy overlapped. Two of his best friends were killed in the attack. The pain remained even as the years passed.

He was plagued with guilt over making it out alive; it took years to feel as if he deserved to be happy again. When joy returned, it was dampened by the absence of two men he considered brothers. He could be guarded and vigilant. He was plagued by PTSD and insomnia.

“It severs your soul in a way that is irreparable,” Wolf said. “You learn to find new joy. You learn to navigate the world in a different way. But it changes you forever.”

As years passed tending to the grief of others, Phillips felt her own heartbreak evolve.

She had climbed out of the depths of debilitating sadness, broke the habits of eating and drinking too much, returned to putting makeup on her face and found a reason to rise from bed.

One day, she made it through without breaking into tears and when she realized it, she cried. Another, a thought of Jessi sent her into a fit of laughter, which in turn spurred a wave of guilt.

Other scars remained: Her thinking was so disjointed and attentiveness so fractured that she couldn’t make it through a book for years. Filling out paperwork in a doctor’s office seemed insurmountable. Sleep remained fitful. The sight of a mother and daughter together was piercing.

“I have that hole in my heart,” she said. “I’m not complete anymore.”

Being on the road and meeting so many others like herself often felt like it helped. She had purpose and helping others brought some solace.

But each tragedy also took its toll. She lost count of the places she’d been. Her phone filled with numbers for people she met, but she could no longer keep all their stories straight.

Isla Vista. Sutherland Springs. Pittsburgh. She’d try to come up with the sorrowful litany of her past decade and her mind would blank. Las Vegas. El Paso. Highland Park. Santa Barbara. Each of them came with blessings but also added to her grief. Virginia Beach. Colorado Springs. Another Aurora. She felt it all building, but pushed on. She was in Buffalo, where a racist took aim at supermarket shoppers, when she had to fly off to Uvalde, where little boys and girls were murdered and uniformed men stood by for a seeming eternity. She was more shaken than she had been in years. The weight of her journey became blatantly clear. The grief swallowed her. And, as quickly as it started 10 years earlier, her trip was over.

• • •

To the very end of her journey, Phillips never stopped telling those she met that they would find happiness again. She believed it to her core and needed them to believe it too.

Now, she had decided to put an end to a trip that came to define her.

But when your life is punctuated by the kind of tragedy she endured, it only has two parts. There is before and after.

After never rivals before. Everyone she met along the way affirmed it.

When Wheeler goes on vacation and a lighthouse appears, it’s impossible not to think of the lanky, wavy-haired teen with a sly smile that his son might have become before the Newtown gunman ended his life.

When Girl Scout cookie season comes, Hart avoids any place they might appear. The cold snap of a fresh-from-the-freezer Thin Mint, once sold by her daughter, now makes her sick to her stomach.

When Wolf’s birthday arrives, it doesn’t matter what revelry it brings, there will always be two missing faces. Food doesn’t taste as good. Songs don’t sound the same. A visit to a nightclub, once carefree, now has him on high alert.

And for Orfanos, the gruesomeness of his son’s death at the bar still permeates his thoughts. Life feels like a performance, an effort to fill time with distractions so as not to focus on the void that defines it.

“It’s been 1,676 days,” he said one day in June. “Maybe the sun has gone up and down 1,676 times, but it’s all just one continuous day for us … Every morning you wake up and you put one foot in front of the other and you just make it through.”

It turned out Phillips wasn’t wrong when she offered confident promises of finding happiness. It was that two things could at once be true.

She had come so far in the space of a decade and yet, in some ways, nothing had changed. For all the therapy sessions, all the personal growth, all the disciplined work to rise from the suffocating depths of sadness, her daughter still was gone. The pace of killings only intensified. Instead of tighter gun laws, some states loosened them.

Exhausted, disgusted and impoverished, the Phillipses came to a radical conclusion: The country they’d pledged their loyalty to and spent their entire lives in had betrayed them.

“We had our daughter taken. We lost everything we had. And we lost our country,” Phillips says.

They rented a house an hour south of Guadalajara, Mexico, in the lakeside town of Ajijic. They continue their advocacy, but since Uvalde, haven’t returned to the road to visit shooting sites.

She is 73 now. He is 79. They know this is their final chapter. They want it to be a happy one.

The distance has been good. When a shooting happens in the U.S., they don’t rush to the TV. They eat at restaurants and don’t worry a gunman might intrude. They walk carefree through a street market, where a lone guitarist croons and strawberries are perfectly stacked. When fireworks go off, they have no fear someone is firing a gun. In their yard, clementines and limes grow and plumerias rain from the trees. Fountains spout, hummingbirds and orioles dart and mountains rise in the background. They even have let Christmas return.

“We’re surrounded by beauty,” Phillips said, “and all in this moment is good.”

The next morning, though, the emotion rushed back. They were quietly sipping coffee on the patio when Sandy looked over at Lonnie and saw his eyes had welled with tears.

“I know, baby,” she said, and no one had to explain anything more.

Sometimes, Jessi visits in her dreams, usually appearing as a toddler. When Phillips awakes, she’ll squeeze her eyes closed and try and coax the vision to return. She begs for more.

“Let me feel her touch me,” she says. “Let me feel her hug me. Let me feel her kiss me on the cheek again. Let me hear her laugh again. Let me hear her high heels coming up the walkway.”

Let me, she wishes, be happy.

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about the AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is responsible for all content.

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