By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project
The Colorado Sun article linked first below is nominally about high school kids, trap shooting, and teaching young ones how to be responsible around guns. The subhead illustrates pretty well:
“Schools in mostly rural counties are building high school shooting teams that teach kids discipline, focus, camaraderie — and most important, how to handle a gun safely.”
Perfectly fine topic. I like the topic, and I like that the Sun is looking outside the metro area to bring interesting stories back to that region, something that they do regularly if I’m going to be fair to them.
If the Sun reporter stayed with the topic of the subhead, if she had focused on what is an unusual sport and how it’s helping youngsters in the way that sports can, this would have been a great article.
The Sun being what it is, Ms. Ross (the writer) being who she is, means that we can’t just leave things there. Ms. Ross takes the time and effort to sneak in some gun control talking points. Her rationale (in particular given she hasn’t responded to my email inquiries–see below) is not something I’m willing to speculate on, but I can tell you what it’s effect is.
An earlier newsletter on Dr. Niemiec, CPW and the state’s wildlife strategy is linked second below. I put it there because one of its themes is quite similar to what Ms. Ross included in her piece. Both are examples of embedding things into what appear to be ordinary discussion.
Sneaking gun control talking points into an article, without any alternative interpretations or context, helps them become common sense. It allows advocates to, as they’ve so often done through the liberal media, get their piece in without facing any counterarguments, until such “chestnuts” (as Ross calls gun rights arguments), become truth.
Let me show you with a couple non-contiguous quotes (pasted here in the same order they appear in Ms. Ross’ piece, with embedded links intact):
“And for kids, ‘even living in a home with a gun increases the risk of gun violence, but particularly when they start to have direct access to firearms themselves. The reality is that gun violence is a leading cause of death for kids and teens in this country‘ [researcher for gun control advocates Giffords Kelly] Drane said.”
“Since Colorado passed a flurry of gun laws starting in 2021, homicides have decreased by 29.5% statewide, aggravated assaults by 11.7% and violent crime by 13.3%, according to the Colorado Department of Criminal Justice 2025 midyear Colorado Crime Trends report.”
Following the link to Gifford’s assertion from the first quote takes you to a pretty looking bar graph which does indeed show what Giffords is claiming. See screenshot 1 for the graph.
The only problem is that there is no method listed for how Giffords arrives at these numbers. It’s just their graph. Trying to follow the link at bottom which Giffords lists as their source just takes you to a CDC database.
I do not know how Gifford arrived at this, their latest iteration of this claim, but if Giffords follows what it’s done in the past, it’s highly dependent on how and where you look. It’s not a robust result which holds up under various ways to parse the data.
To give a sense of what I mean, I refer you to the Snopes fact check from 2023 linked third below (it’s from a Congress.gov site because it was entered into the record of a congressional hearing). This does a great job of dissecting how gun violence data , how claims like Giffords has made in the past and continues to make, depended greatly on including older people (up to 19 as opposed to the cutoff that most might think of for teens at 17 or 18), and excluding infants below 1 year.
You see, only by masking off infant deaths from birth defects, congenital problems, SIDS, and only by making sure to include 18 and 19 year olds who die in large numbers due to crime and gang violence, can Giffords say “gun violence is a leading cause of death for kids and teens in this country.”
You do not hear any of this from Ms. Ross.
Turning now to what Ms. Ross herself writes, the language in that second quote stops short of Ms. Ross making a direct causal link between Colorado’s gun control policy and a decrease in violence, but the inference you are to make as a reader is quite clear: Colorado’s “flurry” of gun laws has led to a decreases in violence.
The fourth link below goes to yesterday’s newsletter. In that edition, I shared a report by a group of citizens about crime in Colorado. This report gives the fuller picture that Ms. Ross doesn’t.
I’ll leave it to you to read through the my newsletter from yesterday, but I can quickly summarize here.
First and foremost among Ms. Ross’ omissions is the fact that, as with Giffords’ work, the picture you get is highly dependent on when and where you look. From the Colorado data shared yesterday, you see that crime has risen steadily in Colorado since 2015 with a mild decline since it’s 2022 peak.
You’ll also note that not all crimes are the same in terms of their rates, locations, and weapons. Murders have fallen a lot, but aggravated assaults are way up. Four metro area counties account for the vast bulk of crime in Colorado (the story here is about rural trap shooting teams remember). Most crime is committed between those that live together, though a small percentage of domestic violence incidents involve a firearm.**
Quite a different picture than crime falling across the board after a “flurry” of bills, no?
Ms. Ross needn’t have gone far to find out a different look at her own crime stats either, certainly not to a wide-ranging look like the one I shared. Whatever her reason for cherry-picking, even her own outlet, the Sun, had different stats than hers on crime. The fourth link below is to one of the Sun’s own fact checks from 2024.
Putting aside the vastly different numbers, I point you to this quote (copied here with links intact):
“The trend corresponded with a national decline in the violent crime rate, which fell 6% from 2022 to 2023, according to the FBI’s quarterly uniform crime report. All violent crime categories were still higher than 2019, the year before the pandemic.”
There is no way to tie gun control to less crime causally, because quite simply there is more than one way to group and count crimes and the patterns you do see could be due to multiple causes.
None of this, of course, stops Ross from backdooring her way into linking them.
To be fair to Ross and the Sun, I reached out to her and Sun editor Coffield to see whether they knew Giffords method, whether they checked it, whether Ross intended to (at least) imply a causal connection between the state’s laws and the crime stats, and whether or not these things went past an editor prior to publication.
As of this writing, I’ve not heard back. If I do, I’ll update.
This story could have been much better. It could have been a look at a different paradigm, a different approach to guns and gun safety–one that uses sport to teach children those lessons.
While plenty of that is there, Ms. Ross and the Sun don’t hesitate to pop with gun control talking points. These talking points, unlike some of the other references Ms. Ross uses, have no method shown for the results given, are based on selective cherry picking of data, and (worst of all) are talking points advocates use to try and drive policy in this state.
One almost wonders if the progressive reporters at the Sun couldn’t help themselves.
**To be clear, I believe that if someone uses violence as their problem solving method in the home, they have no right to have a gun. DV felony? You have just forfeited your Second Amendment rights.
https://coloradosun.com/2026/07/05/colorado-gun-safety-high-school-students-trapshooting/
https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/dr-niemiec-colorados-outdoor-strategy
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115787/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20230419-SD018.pdf
https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/21/crime-down-colorado-2023/
Related:
I want to return to the Sun article I reference above, specifically the following quote:
“Between April 2025 and May 2026, Prop KK has raised over $19 million in funds or an average of $1.4 million per month, said a spokesperson from Gov. Jared Polis’ office.”
Polis’ opacity doesn’t sit well with me, never really has. I tried to get more details from the Department of Revenue about the revenue from Prop KK (where it’s gone, how much).
I was told by a department spokesperson that, due to the ongoing litigation, they’re not going to release any information on the tax.
READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT
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