Politically diverse Coloradans hold wide-ranging views on the right to arms. Many are grateful that right is guaranteed in both state and U.S. constitutions; others aren’t so sure, and yet others wish it had no legal protection.

What all should be able to agree on by now — after successive policies enacted by the state legislature to restrict access to firearms — is that curbing that right doesn’t work. Gun control has failed, utterly, to make Colorado communities safer. No meaningful data has linked gun-control laws to a reduction in crime or other violence. 

Indeed, gun control did nothing to dampen Colorado’s epic crime wave in recent years.

Perhaps that futility is inevitable in a nation said to have three guns for every two people. Roughly half of Colorado households are estimated to have at least one firearm. 

It also underscores the pointlessness of passing more such laws. But they keep coming.

Gun control has become the reflex of a lazy legislature that finds it easier to denounce violence through hollow gestures than to fight crime through tougher law enforcement. Ruling Democrats at the Capitol, blinded by a “justice reform” dogma in which criminals are victims of an unfair society, would rather pick on the law abiding.

By definition, lawful gun owners aren’t committing crimes with their firearms. And by definition, ironically, they are the only ones who are likely to obey ever-more-senseless gun-control laws. Once the law abiding at some point finally have been disarmed, state lawmakers presumably will declare victory. Armed criminals, meanwhile, will continue to prey on everyone else.

So, it’s encouraging to see Colorado’s largest advocacy group for gun owners push back. The Colorado State Shooting Association filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Denver the other day against a law passed weeks earlier by the legislature slapping more regulations as well as small business-busting fines on gun shops. The association previously filed lawsuits against the state’s firearm excise tax and a measure mandating training for the purchase of semiautomatic weapons. Those suits are pending.

In all the cases, the group is seeking to uphold the fundamental, constitutionally recognized right to self-defense, and to “keep and bear arms” toward that end. The legal bids also seem to come with a practical subtext: Why infringe on constitutional rights — making it ever more difficult to legally buy, sell and own firearms — when it won’t curb crime?

The gun-control measures amount to — as shooting association Executive Director Huey Laugesen recently observed in a Sunday Perspective for The Gazette — “the death of our Second Amendment rights by 1,000 cuts.”

“Each year has brought another layer. Another requirement. Another permitting structure. Another category of conduct is regulated,” Laugesen wrote. “And because the changes accumulated gradually, many Coloradans may not fully appreciate how fundamentally the regulatory environment has shifted.”

He also aptly noted, “Colorado has steadily constructed one of the country’s most convoluted and restrictive regulatory systems governing lawful firearms ownership and commerce.”

Colorado’s ruling Democrats dwell in an upside-down world when it comes to the crime fight. Lawmakers systematically have reduced penalties for lawbreakers in recent years and decriminalized even the hardest, most dangerous drugs.

Yet, they have attempted repeatedly to tie the hands of law officers and disarm the law abiding.

We will watch the shooting association’s court actions with interest. And we’ll cheer them on in hopes of restoring rights and reason to Colorado policy.