If That’s The Argument for Colorado’s Permit-To-Purchase Law, It’s a Stupid One

July 27, 2026
8:20 pm

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Colorado’s latest push for a permit-to-purchase scheme is being sold as a “public-safety” measure, yet the only data its backers keep waving around is a single, cherry-picked study that shows a modest drop in gun deaths in two states that adopted similar rules years ago. What the study conveniently ignores is that both states already had shall-issue concealed-carry laws, robust background-check systems, and lower overall violent-crime trends before the permit requirement was added; the authors themselves admit they cannot isolate the permit law’s effect from everything else that was happening at the same time. In other words, the headline argument collapses the moment you ask the obvious follow-up: if the same modest decline shows up in states that never enacted permit-to-purchase, maybe the permit itself isn’t doing the heavy lifting. For Colorado gun owners, the practical stakes are straightforward. A new permitting bureaucracy means an extra fee, an extra trip to a sheriff’s office that may or may not be staffed to handle the volume, and an extra waiting period layered on top of the instant NICS check that already clears the vast majority of purchasers. None of those hurdles has been shown to screen out prohibited persons any better than the existing system; they simply raise the cost, in time and money, of exercising a constitutionally protected right. That disparate impact falls hardest on working families, rural residents, and first-time buyers—the very people anti-gun activists claim to be protecting. The deeper implication is that Colorado’s proposal is part of a national pattern: when “gun violence” statistics refuse to cooperate with the preferred narrative, the solution is to make the data harder to collect by making lawful ownership more difficult. Permit-to-purchase laws function less as crime-fighting tools and more as regulatory trip-wires that turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into low-level offenders for paperwork mistakes. The 2A community’s response should be equally straightforward—demand that any new restriction be justified by Colorado-specific evidence, not recycled studies from different states with different laws, and insist that the burden of proof remain on the government, not on the citizen who already passes a federal background check in seconds.

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For Colorado gun owners, the practical stakes are straightforward. A new permitting bureaucracy means an extra fee, an extra trip to a sheriff’s office that may or may not be staffed to handle the volume, and an extra waiting period layered on top of the instant NICS check that already clears the vast majority of purchasers. None of those hurdles has been shown to screen out prohibited persons any better than the existing system; they simply raise the cost, in time and money, of exercising a constitutionally protected right. That disparate impact falls hardest on working families, rural residents, and first-time buyers—the very people anti-gun activists claim to be protecting.

The deeper implication is that Colorado’s proposal is part of a national pattern: when “gun violence” statistics refuse to cooperate with the preferred narrative, the solution is to make the data harder to collect by making lawful ownership more difficult. Permit-to-purchase laws function less as crime-fighting tools and more as regulatory trip-wires that turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into low-level offenders for paperwork mistakes. The 2A community’s response should be equally straightforward—demand that any new restriction be justified by Colorado-specific evidence, not recycled studies from different states with different laws, and insist that the burden of proof remain on the government, not on the citizen who already passes a federal background check in seconds.

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