The purchase, sale and manufacture of semiautomatic guns that accept detachable ammunition magazines would be banned in Colorado under a bill introduced Wednesday by Democrats on the first day of the state legislature’s 2025 lawmaking term.
Senate Bill 3 would affect many pistols and rifles, whose manufacturers don’t appear to make versions of the weapons without removable magazines.
The legislation also would outlaw rapid-fire trigger activators and bump stocks, which can make a semiautomatic firearm fire at a rate similar to that of an automatic weapon.
The measure would have an effect similar to — or even greater than — legislation that failed at the Capitol in recent years that would have banned the purchase, sale and manufacture of a broad swath of firearms, defined in those bills as assault weapons.
But Senate Bill 3 appears to have a better chance of reaching the governor’s desk given that it has the support of state Sen. Tom Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat whose son was murdered in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, and given the number of cosponsors it was introduced with.
The bill has 18 original cosponsors in the Senate, including all but five Democrats in the chamber. It needs 18 votes to pass the Senate.
If the bill passes the Senate, the legislature’s more politically moderate chamber, it will almost certainly be approved by the House, where it has 24 original cosponsors, and make it to the governor’s desk.
Whether Gov. Jared Polis would sign the bill if it makes it to his desk, however, remains unclear. He has expressed skepticism of measures seeking to ban certain firearms.
In a written statement Wednesday, Polis’ office didn’t take a position on the legislation.
‘With session just beginning and state of the state tomorrow, the governor and his team are just beginning the process of reviewing particular legislation in its introduced form,” Shelby Wieman, a spokeswoman for the governor, said in a written statement.
Republicans are expected to be uniformly opposed to the bill, but they are in big minorities in the House and Senate. The GOP can try to slow the advance of the measure, but they are mostly powerless to stop it.
Gun rights groups are likely to sue to invalidate the measure should it pass.
The ban would go into effect Sept. 1. First-time violations would constitute a Class 2 misdemeanor offense, punishable by jail time and a fine, while a subsequent offense would constitute a Class 6 felony also punishable by prison.
A gun dealer who violates the law would have their license revoked. Violating the law would also prompt the state to bar a person from purchasing a firearm for five years, unless they were convicted of the felony offense, in which case they would be permanently prohibited from possessing a gun.
Most semiautomatic guns — pistols and rifles — accept detachable magazines.
That means weapons that would fall under the ban would include the AR-15 and its variants, as well as AK-47s, TEC-9s, Beretta Cx4 Storms, Sig Sauer SG550s, MAC-10s, and Derya MK-12s.
Other weapons that may be affected include the popular Smith & Wesson M&P 5.7 and Walther CCP, which are pistols. The measure specifically bans the sale, purchase and manufacture of gas-operated semiautomatic handguns.
The bill would give the attorney general the power to list which firearms would be prohibited under the measure. That appears to be an attempt to prevent manufacturers from finding loopholes in the law.
The measure would have exceptions for bolt-, pump-, lever- and slide-action guns, as well as weapons purchased by law enforcement or the military.
Senate Bill 3, should it pass the legislature and be signed into law, would not outlaw possession of the firearms covered by the bill. That means people who have the weapons before the measure goes into effect wouldn’t be affected.
The lead sponsor of the bill is Sullivan. Other main sponsors include Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, and Democratic Reps. Meg Froelich of Arapahoe County and Andrew Boesenecker of Fort Collins.
Democrats in the legislature are pitching Senate Bill 3 as a way to enforce Colorado’s 2013 law banning ammunition magazines with a capacity greater than 15 rounds. Violations of the law have been widely documented, and magazines with a capacity larger than 15 rounds have been used in at least two mass shootings in Colorado since 2013.
“It’s a high capacity magazine enforcement bill,” Sullivan said. “We passed that legislation in 2013. We’ve had 11 years since then. We haven’t gotten buy-in from the industry — they continue to ship high capacity magazines into the state. We haven’t gotten the buy-in from retailers, hobbyists. This is the next step to the enforcement.”
But the reality is gun manufacturers don’t appear to produce versions of the weapons that would be banned under the bill that don’t use or accept detachable magazines, meaning the effect would go far beyond enforcement of the 2013 law.
Sullivan said manufacturers could produce versions of their weapons that have a permanently attached, or “fixed,” 15-round magazine to adhere to the bill, if it passes.
“They will if they want to continue to sell here within the state of Colorado,” he said. “This is a big market.”
Fixed magazines cannot be removed from a gun without tools. Weapons with fixed magazines are often loaded one bullet at a time and thus are must slower to reload than a detachable-magazine firearm.
The bills banning a wide swath of semiautomatic weapons that were brought in 2023 and 2024 died in the House the first year and the Senate in the second after the measures’ sponsors failed to secure enough Democratic votes to advance them.
But the interpersonal and political dynamics at the Capitol have changed since then, and Sullivan’s lead sponsorship of Senate Bill 3 gives the measure a big boost. Sullivan opposed the 2023 and 2024 measures, saying a ban on so-called assault weapons should only be done on the federal level.
Senate Bill 3 was assigned to the Senate State Military and Veterans Affairs Committee. It hasn’t been scheduled for its first hearing yet.