Residents of Boulder, Colorado, have until Dec. 27 to certify their guns with the city authorities.
Instead of confiscating the citizens’ banned rifles, the city wants them to to be certified. The certificate will allow citizens to continue to have the weapons in their possession if they were purchased before the ban. It went into effect via city council vote in May.
So far only 87 certificates out of a city of 100,000 residents have been issued. But even that number consists of duplicates, in at least one case due to dual ownership of a weapon between husband and wife.
Legal Resistance to the Ban
The NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) announced their support for a lawsuit countering the ban, back in June. The Colorado State Shooting Association (CSSA) initiated the lawsuit to protect the rights of citizens to own guns.“We will not stand by and allow the misguided gun control extremists on the city council to strip us of our rights,“ said CSSA executive director Anthony Fabian, via an NRA-ILA news release. ”We are grateful for the NRA’s support of our lawsuit and look forward to restoring the rights of Boulder’s law-abiding citizens.”
Even at the time when legislatures passed the laws in Boulder, they faced threats of legal action. Before the city council vote, the Mountain States Legal Foundation spoke about challenging the ban and alleged it violated the second, fifth, and fourteenth amendments, as well as the Colorado state constitution, according to the Daily Camera.
The “Red Flag” gun confiscation order that led to the death of Willis and the Colorado bans are both seen as reactions to the Parkland, Florida, school shooting.