Colorado’s Second Amendment deserts: Long drives and fewer gun dealers reshape access

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

Colorado’s Second Amendment Deserts — a two part look

If you read as much news as I do, it doesn’t take long to note that Colorado is the land of deserts.

There is the desert (the literal one) out where I live on the Eastern Plains, but that’s not all. There are food deserts. There are childcare deserts. There are maternal care deserts. Abortion and transgender care deserts.

I don’t know that I have ever read about any Second Amendment deserts here in Colorado, however. A natural question is whether there are any.

If a [fill in the blank] desert is a geographical region where something is unduly or unnaturally absent, then a Second Amendment desert would be a region in Colorado where people face either no or a dwindling amount of ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

There are no outright bans, the government is not coming to collect your firearms, but if you struggle to get ammunition for what you have, if you struggle to buy and/or transfer a firearm, have you the ability to fully exercise your natural right?

This is (obviously) a concern by many in the gun rights community. Over and over on gun rights groups’ websites and in testimony before our state legislature, I hear concerns both about how a particular policy will differentially harm rural gun owners/users, along with concerns about how a particular policy will drive firearms and gun dealers out of business.

Both concerns bear examination. In order to get a toehold on the answers, I went to look at the ATF’s records on federal firearm license holders — the ATF’s list of people who run businesses selling firearms. That is the first link below.

I got data specific to Colorado and for the years 2021, 2023-2026. I tried to find data prior to 2021 but was unable, and for some reason, 2022 data for Colorado was not available. I put all the spreadsheets I downloaded into a shareable folder. That is link two below. If you get curious and want to look for patterns of your own, or look more local to you, please download copies and start poking around. If you find something of note, let’s talk.

I will go into more detail in parts 1 and 2 when I look at FFLs across geography and time respectively, but in broad strokes what I find is that Colorado does indeed have Second Amendment deserts. That is, our state has regions without an FFL, and their numbers are falling with time from 2021 to 2026.

The lack of coverage and/or curiosity by our state’s media points to their different priorities and/or lack of concern over the Second Amendment; you will find scads of articles detailing concerns over lack of abortion access or transgender care, but you will find none about lack of access to guns or ammunition by law-abiding Coloradans who want or need to exercise a right explicitly mentioned in both our state and federal constitution.

You find also that concerns by gun rights advocates get borne out by the data. Causal links are tough to define with policy, but one can easily say with confidence that our state has done nothing to encourage firearms dealers to stay in business or to get them to open shops in the regions of our state where there are none. All this while the number of people registered as FFLs falls with time and leaks out geographically. This becomes all the more pertinent as state laws put FFLs more and more in the center of any gun transaction. As I said above, if you struggle to exercise a right, do you have it?

The Second Amendment is not a second-class right, but it is all too often treated like one in Blue Colorado.

https://www.atf.gov/firearms/tools-and-services-firearms-industry/federal-firearms-listings
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1yJwVts1OyeLB4xpkPJjCRQtrdfhgHS20

Colorado gun dealers across the state.

In the first post today, I set out the broad strokes of what this and the subsequent post are about. This post will cover FFL’s, federal firearms licensees (people federally-licensed to sell guns) looking across the state with a broad look at the time period from 2021 to 2026, the years for which ATF data was available.

For convenience’s sake, I put a link to my shared folder with all the Colorado FFL spreadsheets I got from ATF as well as the spreadsheets I used to do various manipulations of the data (such as excerpting all the FFL’s in Denver in 2021 as well as 2026).

In order to look at FFL’s geographically, I chose to make a “heat map”; i.e. I went to Google maps and had it place a pin on a map of Colorado every time a particular Colorado zip code came up in the list of FFL’s.

The map I made is linked second below. I will help you navigate what you see and then show broad results by way of screenshots.

The functionality of the map is no different than any other Google Map. You can move around, zoom in or out as usual. What is new is the pane in the upper left.

Each pin on the map represents an individual FFL in any particular Colorado zip code,** with 2021 data (regardless of location) in red and 2026 data in black. I highlight this in green in screenshot 1 attached.

Also, you can add or remove the different data sets, or “layers” as Google calls them, by checking or unchecking the boxes I highlight in blue in that same picture.

I chose to do statewide data and then look at 3 major Colorado cities, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Grand Junction all in 2021 and 2026. Screenshot 2 is the map winnowed down to just statewide data from 2021 and 2026, with the 2026 data overlaid on top of the 2021.

Screenshot 2 is a copy of that map (again, note that if you go to the live map you can move and zoom).

There are two things to note. One, you’ll note that there are several red pins that are no longer covered. That is an FFL that was here in 2021 and not in 2026. Two, there are whole swaths of the state, in particular in rural areas where FFL’s are missing or thinned out greatly. This is particularly the case in Northwestern Colorado and the Eastern Plains. Zooming in on the map, it is not at all hard to see that if you lived in one of these areas, you could travel upwards of an hour to get to a licensed gun dealer.

I’ll leave it to you to poke around in the map in more detail, but there is one more image to share with you due to it’s pronounced change from 2021 to 2026. Screenshot 3 attached is the same map but I only included Denver FFL’s in 2021 and 2026.

The same holds as before: the red dots are FFL’s that were there in 2021 that are there now. As will be more apparent in graphical form in the post following this one, Denver has seen a continual decline of FFL’s from 2021 to 2026–much more so than its sister cities Grand Junction and Colorado Springs.

As alluded to in the introductory post, causal links are tough to establish, especially for an admittedly simple analysis like this. It’s also important to remember that, since time immemorial, rural Colorado has had fewer of all kinds of services.

The pattern you see in the map, therefore, is not something you can with certainty say evolved from current policy. Regardless of the cause, however, this much is true. When advocates say–in the public square or in the state legislature during testimony–that there are regions in the state where it’s already difficult to exercise your Second Amendment rights due to geography, they are not lying; they are not exaggerating.

Any policy that requires an FFL to be involved in requires, for these people, an extra burden that those in the urban areas of the state do not face, an artificially-created burden on top of the existing one.

Yes indeed there are Second Amendment deserts in this state.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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