Col­orado House clamps down on ‘assault weapons’ sales, bill heads to Sen­ate

Colorado’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic House law­mak­ers passed a bill late Sun­day that would, for the first time in state his­to­ry, pre­vent the sale, pur­chase, or trans­fer of so-called “assault weapons,” set­ting the con­tro­ver­sial leg­is­la­tion on a col­li­sion course with the state Sen­ate.
House Bill 1292 passed 35–27, two votes more than the num­ber need­ed, accord­ing to the Den­ver Gazette. The bill’s sup­port­ers were all Demo­c­ra­t­ic, though nine oth­er Democ­rats sided with Repub­li­cans and vot­ed against it. 

Trib­utes hang on the tem­po­rary fence sur­round­ing the park­ing lot in front of a King Soop­ers gro­cery store in which 10 peo­ple died in a late March mass shoot­ing on Fri­day, April 9, 2021, in Boul­der, Col­orado. (AP Photo/David Zalubows­ki)

While the mea­sure does not ban the pos­ses­sion of “assault weapons,” defined as “high-pow­ered, semi­au­to­mat­ic rifles and pis­tols that have fixed, large-capac­i­ty mag­a­zines or have the abil­i­ty to accept detach­able mag­a­zines, along with var­i­ous oth­er char­ac­ter­is­tics and types of high-pow­ered fi …