Spent some time going through Colorado's firearms history here — it's longer than most people realize and messier than either side of the current debate wants to admit.

"The romantically lawless West was always more regulated at the local level than the legend admits."

This comes up every time someone invokes "the founders" or "the frontier" to win an argument about modern carry laws. Denver had ordinances restricting concealed carry in saloons in the 1860s. That's not a talking point — that's just the historical record. Worth knowing before you cite Tombstone as a constitutional argument.

"Colorado is one of only seven states that explicitly carved concealed carry out of its constitutional right to bear arms protection from the beginning."

This is the part that gets glossed over in most Colorado gun debates. The 1876 framers weren't anti-gun — these were practical men writing law for a territory that had just lived through fifteen years of armed chaos. They protected open carry and deliberately left concealed carry to the legislature. Whether you like what the legislature has done with that discretion since 2013 is a separate conversation, but the authority they're exercising isn't some modern invention.

"What Columbine actually did was seed a generational change in how Colorado's urban population thought about firearms regulation. The full harvest of that shift came later."

That's an honest way to put it. If you were shooting in Colorado in the late '90s and early 2000s, the political climate felt very different than it does now. The 2003 shall-issue conversion felt like a win that would hold. It didn't predict what was coming from the Front Range as the population shifted. The seed-to-harvest timeline matters — policy changes that feel sudden usually have a decade or more of demographic groundwork under them.

For those of us who carry or compete in Colorado, or are just watching what happens here as a preview of what comes to other mountain states — what's your read on how the eastern plains / Front Range divide actually plays out long-term? Does rural political weight hold, or does the population math eventually just run the table?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Colorado Firearms History: From Frontier Territory to the Front Range Culture Wars

Colorado Firearms History: From Frontier Territory to the Front Range Culture Wars

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