As my regular reader (Hi, Jeff!) may have noted, I talk about guns fairly often. In fact, throughout the last nearly eight years I have been writing this column I’ve mentioned gun issues no fewer than 65 times. To sum up: I own several guns, and I also believe in reasonable gun regulation. But, of course, ay, there’s the rub.

Two different measures involving firearms caught my eye this week. The first, as reported in Colorado Politics, is the so-called assault weapons ban that just passed the state House. The other, that might well have escaped your glance, is the new regulation ordered by President Joe Biden that will quietly close loopholes in gun legislation that have long existed, and long been dangerous — the so-called gun show exemptions.

As a career military guy, and a former military cop, I’ve held quite a few weapons in my day. I own what might be called the ultimate anti-assault rifle, in that I have a Brown Bess musket, modeled on the ones our Revolutionary War soldiers carried. I can fire about one musket ball per minute, while modern military-grade assault rifles shoot dozens of rounds in that time.

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And that is an important point to make: military grade. Often, we hear “military style” or some such thing. It’s used to describe having epaulets on your shirt or even short haircuts (I’m high and tight even to this day). But military style is just that, style. Style has little to nothing to do with capability and function. Style is how things look. I could make a few negative comments about the style of uniforms found in my brothers and sisters in arms in the new Space Force, but I’ll resist.

Where was I?

Oh, right. House Bill 1292 passed the House with nine Democrats voting against it, along with all the GOPers. So, it’s off to the state Senate, and we’ll see what happens there.

For guns, military grade, at least to me, can be broken down into the answers to three questions: How far does it shoot? How rapidly does it shoot? And how many rounds does it send downrange from a single magazine? If the answers are close to what I carried as a military cop (120 rounds, semi-automatic, high-power assault rifle), it is in the military grade realm, and we should think carefully as to whether regular folks should be able to carry such a weapon.

The core of the issue to me is not what guns look like. Back in the 1994 there was a 10-year ban on new manufacturing only of assault rifles. It was not renewed when it expired. To this day, I applaud the intent of the bill — keeping military-grade weapons out of non-military folks’ hands.

But there were significant problems with that bill, in spite of the good it did. Style got confused with grade. For example, my Brown Bess musket has a bayonet lug, that is to say, a bit of metal on the barrel upon which you can affix a bayonet. Under the 1994 law, there were modern assault rifles that were legal, unless a bayonet lug was affixed. With a lug attached, that particular model was banned. That didn’t make any sense. That lug, of course, had nothing to do with the gun’s ability to kill. There are few bayonet charges in the modern military. We need to make sure our Colorado bill does not suffer from similar well-intended but ultimately ineffective provisions.

The bill has lots of exemptions, and you can read the bill yourself to see what they are. And one very important thing the bill would ban is the so-called bump stock. This device, more formally known as a “rapid-fire trigger activator” is a mass-murder device.

You may recall the horrible mass shooting back in 2017 in Las Vegas, when the murderer, whose name I shall never mention, used these bump stocks to essentially convert his semi-automatic assault rifles (you have to pull the trigger once for every bullet) to fully automatic (pull and hold the trigger, and all the rounds in the magazine fire very rapidly).

I don’t know how the Colorado legislation will do from here on out, but as near as I can tell, the legislation seems to be on the right track. But a few days ago, President Biden signed new regulations that will have an impact regarding what most gun-control advocates have long thought was a major problem: gun show sales. Now, as part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, gun-show dealers will be required to obtain a license and to conduct background checks regardless of location.

The last time I bought a gun, admittedly a few years ago, my background check was done via a fax line in about 15 minutes, so such a check need not be terribly burdensome. Another loophole that was closed seems obvious in hindsight: if a gun dealer loses his federal license to sell guns, he cannot declare that his gun inventory is now his “personal collection,” as guns from such “private” collections can be sold by private individuals.

There are no gun regulations that make everyone happy. But as I’ve noted before, most folks accept reasonable limits. The tough part, of course, is the word “reasonable.” Is it reasonable for any American to own a flame thrower? How about a biological weapon? A smallpox-carrying bomb? Heck, a nuke? No, of course not. What guns Americans can reasonably own will always be up for debate, and that debate must continue, and it must be more substantive than arguing about bayonet lugs.

Both the proposed Colorado law and the president’s new order are steps toward a safer tomorrow. Will either work?

Stay tuned…

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.