The House on Tuesday advanced a bill seeking to lift the state’s ban on local governments passing stricter gun laws than those that exist in state law over objections from Republican lawmakers.

Much of the second reading debate mirrored the debate on Senate Bill 256 before the House State, Civic, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee last week. The bill’s sponsors, Democratic Reps. Edie Hooton of Boulder and Lindsey Daugherty of Arvada, framed their effort as chiefly a matter of empowering local communities to take steps to prevent gun violence.

“Gun violence prevention policies should be a matter of local control,” Hooton said as she introduced the bill on the House floor. “Violence and gun suicide is not a one-size-fits-all that local legislators should be forbidden from addressing.”

Hooton noted that gun homicide is a major issue in places such as Denver County, while rural jurisdictions such as Park County have been plagued by gun suicide.

“Urban counties that experienced more gun homicide should be able to regulate guns differently from rural counterparts experiencing gun suicides,” she said.

Rep. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who represents the area in Boulder where a mass shooting at a King Soopers took place in March, also focused on the local control element.

“If in my community, we choose how we want to address gun safety and we choose to do three or four different things to make our community safer, that should be our right,” Amabile said. “We’ve experienced a horrific event, and we as a community should get to decide how we respond to that event.”

Republicans, meanwhile, continued their line of argument that if the bill were truly a local-control effort, it would allow communities to loosen regulations on guns beyond the laws set by the state.

“The premise of this bill somehow being local control is false,” said Castle Rock Republican Rep. Patrick Neville, repeating a point he made during the bill’s committee hearing. “If it was truly local control, it would be left to go either way, but this just says they can be stricter on gun control, they can’t be less restrictive.”

GOP lawmakers also raised concerns the bill would create a patchwork of different regulations that would cause confusion for gun owners passing through a jurisdiction with different regulations than their own.

“We’re making criminals out of law-abiding citizens,” said Rep. Matt Soper, R-Delta.

In committee, Daugherty highlighted an amendment added by the Senate aimed at alleviating those concerns. Under that amendment, local laws and regulations would only be able to impose a criminal penalty on a person “who knew or reasonably should have known that the person’s conduct was prohibited.”

“If a person didn’t know they were breaking the law, they cannot be charged with a criminal penalty,” Daugherty said.

But Neville countered that “any reasonable person is expected to know the laws of the state” and that it would come down to the court system to rule in such a case.

“Good luck winning the court case,” he said. “What average citizen who’s just trying to protect themselves and their family has the ability to actually go up and appeal this process — the time, the energy, the money — and then hope the court makes the right decision?”

Republicans ran a handful of amendments attempting to address those issues and others they highlighted such as how the bill would affect the interplay between local governments and special districts. All but one, an amendment from Neville and Soper lowering the penalty for a first violation of the bill’s provisions to a civil penalty, were rejected by the House’s Democratic majority.

The bill now advances to a final House vote. Should it pass, the amendment from Neville and Soper means that the House and Senate need to reconcile the differences before the bill could go to Gov. Jared Polis’ desk.