If there is one thing my long-suffering editor really likes in my columns, it is when I manage to irritate just about every reader, while not coming up with any real answers or solutions (Ed: um, no, that’s not what I said). And so today, I thought I would offer a few thoughts on a very interesting Colorado Politics story that recently appeared, wherein there is some rather dramatic differences of opinion – guns and gun laws.

It seems that among the annual rites of Spring, beyond the getting back on daylight savings time and our traditional March blizzards, we usually see a pattern of GOP members of the state legislature introducing a bunch of bills to, as they would claim, “protect” gun ownership rights, and the Dems then push back on the package of firearm legislative proposals. Given the Dems now (thankfully) run things in Colorado, the Republican bills do not get passed, and both sides leap to the perceived moral high ground to denounce the wicked ways of the others.

What’s a moderate to do? Well, as it turns out, I am a moderate Democrat. 

I’m quite happy with Gov. Polis and agree with most of the Dem agenda in this legislative session. But this volley (bad metaphor?) of gun law proposals caught my eye, and I cannot help but wonder if both sides are so deeply entrenched on the overall issues around guns that all “pro-gun” proposals are wrong to the Dems, and so are any Dem-sponsored “common sense gun law” proposals from the GOP point of view?

Full disclosure: I’m a gun owner. I am a retired career military officer and former military cop. I like guns. I know that statement alone will shock some of my dear friends, but it is true. I am not a gun nut, whatever that means, as I own only four (three handguns and – I swear it’s true – a replica Revolutionary War musket). I never cared about cars, but I liked the engineering and feel of weapons. So far, I sound kinda GOP-ish? 

But where I part ways with many of my fellow gun owners is my view of how they should be regulated. There are those on the right who wave the Second Amendment around like it was a blank check, good for any weapon they want, and anyone who challenges that is a bad person. 

That, dear readers, is nonsense. 

As noted, I’m not a car guy, but I accept that car ownership and operation should be carefully and properly regulated. You need a license to drive a car, and you need to operate it safely, or you will get a ticket. For the life of me, I cannot understand how guns are any different – they should be licensed and carefully regulated because, like cars, they can take injure, maim, and take lives when misused.

We need good and proper gun laws. Only the most extreme would argue that we should be able to, as private citizens, own weapons of war. You should not be able to buy, say, a flame thrower or a small tactical nuke, and your crazy neighbor doesn’t get to buy an anthrax cannon. 

But what regulations make sense, and which do not, is an important conversation that is all too infrequently held at state and national legislatures. This year’s crop of bills is illustrative of the problem. 

For example, House Bill 1082, proposed by a Republican, would basically exempt a person from a background check on a gun purchase if they already had had a background check as part of getting a concealed weapons permit. This makes sense to me. I have such a permit and passed the background check. Why spend the money to do an additional background check? Now, I can see that there should be limits if, say, the previous background check was a long time ago and you want to make sure the person has not done anything wrong recently, but the concept of this bill is, in my view, OK. But the Dems rejected it.

Conversely, the GOP also proposed House Bill 1070, which would repeal the ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines for various weapons. This proposal, from my point of view, is, well, nuts. For some reason, the “super gun people” feel these restrictions are wrong, because, I guess, if I want to be able to fire 30 rounds of high-velocity bullets from my assault rifle, I should be able to do so without reloading. Putting on my former military cop hat, I assert that that idea is extremely dangerous and profoundly unwise. 

There are other bills that died, such as the one that would allow the carrying of concealed guns on school property if the person had a license for it (a bad idea). But I hope you get my main point? Simply rejecting any gun regulation while shouting about the Second Amendment is wrong and dangerous. But so is the converse. 

There can be well-thought-out and carefully crafted gun legislation that can make us safer while still respecting everyone’s rights. Efforts to flood the legislative system with gun laws to ease or to restrict is political rather than practical. 

There, that should be enough to offend, well, just about everyone.