Eric Talley was among those murdered at a King Soopers in Boulder, Colo. when a gunman used an AR-15 to commit a mass shooting. Courtesy Boulder Police Department.
Last updated on June 7, 2026
Trump Justice Department lawsuit casts Denver’s assault weapons ban as a civil rights violation despite Colorado’s history of mass shootings and federal court rulings upholding similar gun laws
The Justice Department’s lawsuit against Denver deserves more than a legal answer. It deserves outrage.
The federal government has sued the City and County of Denver and the Denver Police Department because Denver has kept in place a local assault weapons ordinance. The complaint asks a federal court to block Denver from enforcing that law against AR-15-style rifles with standard-capacity magazines. It also claims that Denver police, by enforcing the ordinance, engage in a pattern or practice of violating Second Amendment rights under a federal civil rights statute.
That theory turns civil rights inside out.
Civil rights law should protect people from government abuse, racial discrimination, official violence, unlawful detention and the denial of equal citizenship. It should not protect the civilian market for a weapon repeatedly used to murder children, teachers, moviegoers, shoppers, worshippers, clubgoers and people at parades and concerts.
Denver’s city attorney called the Justice Department’s demand baseless, irresponsible and a clear overreach of federal power. That description is accurate, but I think it is quite restrained.
The lawsuit is worse than federal overreach. It asks a court to treat Denver’s effort to reduce the risk of mass killing as the constitutional problem. It treats the AR-15-style rifle as the rights-holder’s object of concern and treats communities that have buried the dead as obstacles to liberty.
Colorado knows better.
This is the state of Columbine, Aurora, Boulder, and Club Q. Mass shooting is not an abstraction here. It is geography. It is memory. It is part of the civic landscape of a state that has watched ordinary places become killing grounds.
Columbine did not involve an AR-15. The weapons used there included a TEC-DC9 assault pistol, a Hi-Point 9 mm carbine, and two shotguns. Whatever the specific weapon of havoc was used, Columbine remains part of Colorado’s long experience with semiautomatic firepower, weak access rules, and mass murder.
Aurora did involve an AR-15-style rifle. So did Boulder. Public reporting has also described the Club Q weapon as an AR-15-style rifle. Those facts indicate that the Justice Department’s complaint does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in a state that has seen what happens when high-capacity civilian firepower meets theaters, grocery stores and places of refuge.
The national record is even more damning. Sandy Hook should have changed the country. It should have ended any serious argument that AR-15-style rifles could remain as widely available as ordinary consumer goods without imposing a cost on everyone else’s freedom.
On Dec. 14, 2012, 20 children and six educators were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The Connecticut state attorney’s report identified the Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S semiautomatic rifle as the weapon that fired the tested 5.56 mm shell casings recovered at the school. The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission dedicated its final report to the 26 victims killed there.
That massacre should have produced a national response equal to the loss. Tragically, it did not.
For many Americans, including me, that failure caused more than policy disagreement. It damaged confidence in the national government. It produced moral revulsion. It made official expressions of care sound ceremonial because they were not followed by laws strong enough to reduce the chance that the same kind of killing would happen again.
Then came Parkland. Then Uvalde. Then more names, more vigils, more promises, more inaction.
Now the Justice Department proposes to turn that history into a civil rights claim on behalf of the weapon.
The department’s complaint argues that AR-15-style rifles are bearable arms in common use for lawful purposes and therefore cannot be banned. Its press release framed the Denver ordinance as an unconstitutional ban on commonly owned semiautomatic rifles. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.
The Second Amendment protects an individual right. But the Constitution does not require Denver, the State of Colorado, or any other government to accept a rule that lets the firearms industry create constitutional immunity by flooding the civilian market with a dangerous product.
That is the flaw in the Justice Department’s common-use theory. It turns market saturation into constitutional destiny. Sell enough rifles. Normalize enough firepower. Call large magazines standard. Then argue that the government waited too long to regulate.
No democratic society should accept that rule. A weapon should not become harder to regulate because manufacturers and retailers have distributed it more efficiently.
Federal courts have not accepted the gun rights movement’s strongest version of that argument. They have not held that the Second Amendment categorically shields AR-15-style rifles from regulation, or even from bans. Post-Bruen appellate courts have upheld assault weapons and large-capacity magazine restrictions. In 2025, the Supreme Court declined to review challenges to Maryland’s assault weapons ban and Rhode Island’s large-capacity magazine law, leaving lower-court rulings upholding those measures in place.
That does not mean the issue has disappeared. Several justices have signaled interest in taking up the question. But legal uncertainty does not justify the Justice Department’s certainty. The federal government is not enforcing a settled constitutional command. It is advancing an aggressive claim and pretending Denver stands outside the law.
Denver’s response letter bluntly made the point. The city rightly pointed out that all six federal appellate courts which have considered assault weapons or large-capacity magazine restrictions after Bruen had upheld them. The city also acknowledged that the 10th Circuit has not yet ruled directly on such a law.
Colorado law also supports regulation. In 2013, the General Assembly limited large-capacity ammunition magazines. In Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Polis, the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously upheld that law against a challenge under the state constitution’s right-to-bear-arms provision. The court did not decide a federal Second Amendment claim under the Supreme Court’s later Bruen framework. But it confirmed a crucial point about Colorado’s constitutional order: gun rights and public safety can coexist.
Colorado’s 2025 semiautomatic firearms law follows the same premise. SB25-003 creates requirements for the purchase or transfer of specified semiautomatic firearms beginning Aug. 1, 2026. Information provided by the State describes the law as applying to semiautomatic rifles or shotguns with detachable magazines and gas-operated semiautomatic handguns with detachable magazines.
That is regulation, not confiscation. It does not abolish private gun ownership. It does not disarm the public. It recognizes that some weapons and accessories create a distinct danger because they allow a person to fire many rounds quickly, wound many people in seconds and make escape, intervention and survival less likely.
Legislatures draw lines when experience shows that existing law has failed. Colorado drew one in 2013. It drew another in 2025. Denver drew one decades ago.
The Justice Department wants a federal court to make that line-drawing suspect. But the moral case for these laws is written in names.
No list in a commentary can do justice to all the people killed or wounded in mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons and similar high-capacity semiautomatic firearms. Naming some of them does not exclude the others. It resists the abstraction on which the Justice Department’s lawsuit depends. The full record is longer than any column should have to carry.
In Aurora, the dead included Jonathan Blunk, Alexander A.J. Boik, Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden, Jessica Ghawi, John Larimer, Matt McQuinn, Micayla Medek, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, Alex Sullivan, Alex Teves, and Rebecca Wingo. Twelve people were killed, and dozens more were wounded.
In Boulder, the dead were Tralona Bartkowiak, Suzanne Fountain, Teri Leiker, Kevin Mahoney, Lynn Murray, Rikki Olds, Neven Stanisic, Denny Stong, Eric Talley, and Jody Waters. A jury convicted the shooter of murder in 2024 after prosecutors said he used a legally purchased Ruger AR-556 pistol.
At Club Q in Colorado Springs, police identified the five people killed as Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh, and Raymond Green Vance. The Colorado Springs Police Department identified the victims by name and pronouns, reflecting how they identified themselves and how their families loved and identified them.
Those Colorado names belong to a broader national record. The Washington Post reported that 10 of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass killings since 2012 involved AR-15-style guns. In a later investigation, the Post reported that AR-15s had been used in 10 of the 18 shootings since 2012 in which 10 or more people were killed.
The places have become a grim national map: Newtown, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, El Paso, Uvalde, Highland Park, Buffalo, Aurora, Boulder, and Colorado Springs.
The AR-15 is certainly not the only weapon used in American gun violence. Handguns account for far more gun homicides overall. But AR-15-style weapons have become central to the American horror of public mass killing. They have helped turn classrooms, theaters, grocery stores, churches, nightclubs, concerts and parades into scenes of slaughter.
A weapon can account for a smaller share of total homicides and still present an extraordinary danger in mass shootings. Governments may regulate that danger. They should.
The Justice Department’s complaint repeatedly invokes law-abiding citizens. That phrase performs heavy work in gun rights rhetoric. It suggests that the public can be divided neatly between people who can be trusted with extraordinary firepower and people who cannot.
Experience teaches a harder lesson. Every mass shooter is law-abiding until the law stops him, or fails to. The dead at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Parkland, Boulder, Uvalde, and Club Q were not killed by a constitutional category. They were killed by people who gained access to weapons before law, policy, families, police, schools, or the surrounding community interrupted the danger.
A serious government would treat that pattern as a reason for protective regulation. This Justice Department treats it as a reason to sue Denver.
Its use of 34 U.S.C. § 12601 makes the choice especially revealing. That statute prohibits governmental authorities and their agents from engaging in a pattern or practice of law enforcement conduct that deprives people of federal rights. DOJ now says that Denver police officers create such a pattern by enforcing a local ordinance enacted to protect the public.
Denver rightly challenged that use of the law. The city said that Congress enacted § 12601 after the Rodney King beating to give the federal government tools to address excessive force and other police misconduct and not to give the DOJ a vehicle to attack a local firearms ordinance.
That is an important event to consider for this reason, if no other: civil rights enforcement draws its authority from the long struggle to protect people from abuses of power. It should protect the person beaten by police, the voter blocked from political participation, the child excluded from opportunity, the detainee abused by the state, and the person denied equal protection. It should not become a litigation strategy for stopping a city from regulating a weapon associated with America’s most unbearable public massacres.
A better conception of civil rights starts somewhere else. It starts with the child trying to learn, the teacher who is trying to protect a classroom, the moviegoer sitting in the dark, the shopper engaged in buying groceries, the LGBTQ person entering a club that should be a refuge, and the parent waiting outside a school for news no parent should ever receive.
A civil right is the right to survive a school day, a movie, a grocery trip, a parade, a concert, a night out. A civil right is most certainly not the right to flood communities with the weapon most closely associated with America’s worst mass shootings.
Denver should fight this lawsuit. Colorado should defend its 2013 and 2025 laws. And the rest of us should reject the Justice Department’s attempt to launder gun deregulation through the language of liberty.
The Justice Department has chosen its side. Denver should stand on the other one: with the living, with the dead, and with the communities that have buried enough neighbors already.
About Author
COMMENTARY: The AR-15 Is Not a Civil Right
Last updated on June 7, 2026
Trump Justice Department lawsuit casts Denver’s assault weapons ban as a civil rights violation despite Colorado’s history of mass shootings and federal court rulings upholding similar gun laws
The Justice Department’s lawsuit against Denver deserves more than a legal answer. It deserves outrage.
The federal government has sued the City and County of Denver and the Denver Police Department because Denver has kept in place a local assault weapons ordinance. The complaint asks a federal court to block Denver from enforcing that law against AR-15-style rifles with standard-capacity magazines. It also claims that Denver police, by enforcing the ordinance, engage in a pattern or practice of violating Second Amendment rights under a federal civil rights statute.
That theory turns civil rights inside out.
Civil rights law should protect people from government abuse, racial discrimination, official violence, unlawful detention and the denial of equal citizenship. It should not protect the civilian market for a weapon repeatedly used to murder children, teachers, moviegoers, shoppers, worshippers, clubgoers and people at parades and concerts.
Denver’s city attorney called the Justice Department’s demand baseless, irresponsible and a clear overreach of federal power. That description is accurate, but I think it is quite restrained.
The lawsuit is worse than federal overreach. It asks a court to treat Denver’s effort to reduce the risk of mass killing as the constitutional problem. It treats the AR-15-style rifle as the rights-holder’s object of concern and treats communities that have buried the dead as obstacles to liberty.
Colorado knows better.
This is the state of Columbine, Aurora, Boulder, and Club Q. Mass shooting is not an abstraction here. It is geography. It is memory. It is part of the civic landscape of a state that has watched ordinary places become killing grounds.
Columbine did not involve an AR-15. The weapons used there included a TEC-DC9 assault pistol, a Hi-Point 9 mm carbine, and two shotguns. Whatever the specific weapon of havoc was used, Columbine remains part of Colorado’s long experience with semiautomatic firepower, weak access rules, and mass murder.
Aurora did involve an AR-15-style rifle. So did Boulder. Public reporting has also described the Club Q weapon as an AR-15-style rifle. Those facts indicate that the Justice Department’s complaint does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in a state that has seen what happens when high-capacity civilian firepower meets theaters, grocery stores and places of refuge.
The national record is even more damning. Sandy Hook should have changed the country. It should have ended any serious argument that AR-15-style rifles could remain as widely available as ordinary consumer goods without imposing a cost on everyone else’s freedom.
On Dec. 14, 2012, 20 children and six educators were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The Connecticut state attorney’s report identified the Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S semiautomatic rifle as the weapon that fired the tested 5.56 mm shell casings recovered at the school. The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission dedicated its final report to the 26 victims killed there.
That massacre should have produced a national response equal to the loss. Tragically, it did not.
For many Americans, including me, that failure caused more than policy disagreement. It damaged confidence in the national government. It produced moral revulsion. It made official expressions of care sound ceremonial because they were not followed by laws strong enough to reduce the chance that the same kind of killing would happen again.
Then came Parkland. Then Uvalde. Then more names, more vigils, more promises, more inaction.
Now the Justice Department proposes to turn that history into a civil rights claim on behalf of the weapon.
The department’s complaint argues that AR-15-style rifles are bearable arms in common use for lawful purposes and therefore cannot be banned. Its press release framed the Denver ordinance as an unconstitutional ban on commonly owned semiautomatic rifles. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.
The Second Amendment protects an individual right. But the Constitution does not require Denver, the State of Colorado, or any other government to accept a rule that lets the firearms industry create constitutional immunity by flooding the civilian market with a dangerous product.
That is the flaw in the Justice Department’s common-use theory. It turns market saturation into constitutional destiny. Sell enough rifles. Normalize enough firepower. Call large magazines standard. Then argue that the government waited too long to regulate.
No democratic society should accept that rule. A weapon should not become harder to regulate because manufacturers and retailers have distributed it more efficiently.
Federal courts have not accepted the gun rights movement’s strongest version of that argument. They have not held that the Second Amendment categorically shields AR-15-style rifles from regulation, or even from bans. Post-Bruen appellate courts have upheld assault weapons and large-capacity magazine restrictions. In 2025, the Supreme Court declined to review challenges to Maryland’s assault weapons ban and Rhode Island’s large-capacity magazine law, leaving lower-court rulings upholding those measures in place.
That does not mean the issue has disappeared. Several justices have signaled interest in taking up the question. But legal uncertainty does not justify the Justice Department’s certainty. The federal government is not enforcing a settled constitutional command. It is advancing an aggressive claim and pretending Denver stands outside the law.
Denver’s response letter bluntly made the point. The city rightly pointed out that all six federal appellate courts which have considered assault weapons or large-capacity magazine restrictions after Bruen had upheld them. The city also acknowledged that the 10th Circuit has not yet ruled directly on such a law.
Colorado law also supports regulation. In 2013, the General Assembly limited large-capacity ammunition magazines. In Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Polis, the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously upheld that law against a challenge under the state constitution’s right-to-bear-arms provision. The court did not decide a federal Second Amendment claim under the Supreme Court’s later Bruen framework. But it confirmed a crucial point about Colorado’s constitutional order: gun rights and public safety can coexist.
Colorado’s 2025 semiautomatic firearms law follows the same premise. SB25-003 creates requirements for the purchase or transfer of specified semiautomatic firearms beginning Aug. 1, 2026. Information provided by the State describes the law as applying to semiautomatic rifles or shotguns with detachable magazines and gas-operated semiautomatic handguns with detachable magazines.
That is regulation, not confiscation. It does not abolish private gun ownership. It does not disarm the public. It recognizes that some weapons and accessories create a distinct danger because they allow a person to fire many rounds quickly, wound many people in seconds and make escape, intervention and survival less likely.
Legislatures draw lines when experience shows that existing law has failed. Colorado drew one in 2013. It drew another in 2025. Denver drew one decades ago.
The Justice Department wants a federal court to make that line-drawing suspect. But the moral case for these laws is written in names.
No list in a commentary can do justice to all the people killed or wounded in mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons and similar high-capacity semiautomatic firearms. Naming some of them does not exclude the others. It resists the abstraction on which the Justice Department’s lawsuit depends. The full record is longer than any column should have to carry.
In Aurora, the dead included Jonathan Blunk, Alexander A.J. Boik, Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden, Jessica Ghawi, John Larimer, Matt McQuinn, Micayla Medek, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, Alex Sullivan, Alex Teves, and Rebecca Wingo. Twelve people were killed, and dozens more were wounded.
In Boulder, the dead were Tralona Bartkowiak, Suzanne Fountain, Teri Leiker, Kevin Mahoney, Lynn Murray, Rikki Olds, Neven Stanisic, Denny Stong, Eric Talley, and Jody Waters. A jury convicted the shooter of murder in 2024 after prosecutors said he used a legally purchased Ruger AR-556 pistol.
At Club Q in Colorado Springs, police identified the five people killed as Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh, and Raymond Green Vance. The Colorado Springs Police Department identified the victims by name and pronouns, reflecting how they identified themselves and how their families loved and identified them.
Those Colorado names belong to a broader national record. The Washington Post reported that 10 of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass killings since 2012 involved AR-15-style guns. In a later investigation, the Post reported that AR-15s had been used in 10 of the 18 shootings since 2012 in which 10 or more people were killed.
The places have become a grim national map: Newtown, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, El Paso, Uvalde, Highland Park, Buffalo, Aurora, Boulder, and Colorado Springs.
The AR-15 is certainly not the only weapon used in American gun violence. Handguns account for far more gun homicides overall. But AR-15-style weapons have become central to the American horror of public mass killing. They have helped turn classrooms, theaters, grocery stores, churches, nightclubs, concerts and parades into scenes of slaughter.
A weapon can account for a smaller share of total homicides and still present an extraordinary danger in mass shootings. Governments may regulate that danger. They should.
The Justice Department’s complaint repeatedly invokes law-abiding citizens. That phrase performs heavy work in gun rights rhetoric. It suggests that the public can be divided neatly between people who can be trusted with extraordinary firepower and people who cannot.
Experience teaches a harder lesson. Every mass shooter is law-abiding until the law stops him, or fails to. The dead at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Parkland, Boulder, Uvalde, and Club Q were not killed by a constitutional category. They were killed by people who gained access to weapons before law, policy, families, police, schools, or the surrounding community interrupted the danger.
A serious government would treat that pattern as a reason for protective regulation. This Justice Department treats it as a reason to sue Denver.
Its use of 34 U.S.C. § 12601 makes the choice especially revealing. That statute prohibits governmental authorities and their agents from engaging in a pattern or practice of law enforcement conduct that deprives people of federal rights. DOJ now says that Denver police officers create such a pattern by enforcing a local ordinance enacted to protect the public.
Denver rightly challenged that use of the law. The city said that Congress enacted § 12601 after the Rodney King beating to give the federal government tools to address excessive force and other police misconduct and not to give the DOJ a vehicle to attack a local firearms ordinance.
That is an important event to consider for this reason, if no other: civil rights enforcement draws its authority from the long struggle to protect people from abuses of power. It should protect the person beaten by police, the voter blocked from political participation, the child excluded from opportunity, the detainee abused by the state, and the person denied equal protection. It should not become a litigation strategy for stopping a city from regulating a weapon associated with America’s most unbearable public massacres.
A better conception of civil rights starts somewhere else. It starts with the child trying to learn, the teacher who is trying to protect a classroom, the moviegoer sitting in the dark, the shopper engaged in buying groceries, the LGBTQ person entering a club that should be a refuge, and the parent waiting outside a school for news no parent should ever receive.
A civil right is the right to survive a school day, a movie, a grocery trip, a parade, a concert, a night out. A civil right is most certainly not the right to flood communities with the weapon most closely associated with America’s worst mass shootings.
Denver should fight this lawsuit. Colorado should defend its 2013 and 2025 laws. And the rest of us should reject the Justice Department’s attempt to launder gun deregulation through the language of liberty.
The Justice Department has chosen its side. Denver should stand on the other one: with the living, with the dead, and with the communities that have buried enough neighbors already.
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Hank Lacey
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