Sheriffs Refuse to Enforce Colorado’s New Gun Training Certificate Scheme

In yet another installment of the battle for the Second Amendment, the state of Colorado has passed a rather egregiously stupid and likely unconstitutional law they have misnamed the Semiautomatic Firearms and Rapid-Fire Devices Act. This new law appears to be trying to sidestep Supreme Court precedents by now banning the purchase of a range of semi-automatic firearms, but only making a prospective buyer pay for a training course and get permission from the state before making his or her purchase.

That doesn’t seem like it will hold up to muster in this post-Bruen world, but we’ll have to wait for the answer to that. What’s really interesting, though, is how some of the sheriffs in some rural Colorado counties are reacting to this, being that they are the ones tasked with preparing and conducting said training and certification.

In short, they aren’t happy.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife was in charge of preparing county sheriffs’ offices with the resources necessary to implement the law. This included ensuring the permitting systems were working before or by Aug. 1 so that there would not be delay once the law took effect. 

Many county sheriffs’ offices, however, pushed back on the law’s implementation, either issuing a statement of disagreement while still participating in its enforcement, or disagreeing and refusing enforcement altogether. 

The latter is what the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office did just four days before the the law went into effect.

Sheriff Steven Nowlin issued a statement announcing his office “will not be participating in the management and issuance of the training certificate required through the mandated Colorado Parks and Wildlife program for any person to purchase or transfer a specified restrictive semiautomatic rifle, shotgun or handgun identified by the Colorado Department of Revenue as provided by Senate Bill 25-003 effective August 1, 2026.” 

A similar thing happened when Colorado passed a law some years ago limiting magazine capacity to 15 rounds or less. Mind you, there are any number of places where one can drive into Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, or New Mexico and buy any magazine they like; that law may have been even dumber than this one, especially considering that magazines aren’t serial numbered and don’t have their date of manufacture on them, and pre-existing magazines were grandfathered in; so no cop in the world could tell the difference between a 30-round magazine that had been in a Weld County shooter’s safe for thirty years and one he brought back from a Cheyenne gun shop the day before.

But these people don’t pass gun laws because they think they will work. They pass them because there has been some event, some crime, some shooting, and they start howling, “We need to do something. This is something – let’s do this!”

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For my money, though, it was the response from the Sheriff of Montezuma County, a largely rural county in the Four Corners area of southwestern Colorado, who hit the home run in his refusal. After citing a list of practical considerations in the reply, including the slight problem that the state of Colorado expects Montezuma County to absorb the cost of all this, Sheriff Steven D. Nolin has this last point to make:

As a Colorado Sheriff, and every member of the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office, each of us have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Colorado, and perform the duties of the Office of Sheriff in Colorado by protecting those rights for all citizens in Montezuma County

Pow. Or boom. Or biff-bam-krunk. Whatever audible salute you choose, this is how it’s done. The Sheriff is sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, and he is doing that job as he sees it. Montezuma County is lucky to have Sheriff Nolin around; rather luckier than much of the rest of the state, in fact.

You can read Sheriff Nolin’s entire statement here.

Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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