Coloradan Gun Culture in the wake of SB25-003
Several AK-pattern assault rifles on display at the Tanner Gun Show in Colorado Springs, June 13, 2026. (Nicholas Merl/Radio 1190)
“Why wait two extra weeks to buy it?” a man says to his friend. The Seller shrugs from behind his desk. “You got six weeks left my man,” he says.
The item on discussion is a particularly handsome Serbian-made Zastava assault rifle, based on Mikhail Kalashnikov’s famous AK-47 design. This one sports a folding stock and a modified iron sight. The Zastava and its relatives in the AK family were easily some of the most well-represented pieces on display in the Norris Penrose Center’s convention hall. This is of course unsurprising. Out of one billion small arms worldwide, one out of ten is an AK-pattern rifle.
The conversation I’m eavesdropping on is a microcosm of the general atmosphere present at the Tanner Gun Show’s June 13 exhibition in Colorado Springs. The “six weeks” the seller is referring to is the time left until Colorado Senate Bill 25-003 comes into action on Aug. 1.
After that, knowingly “manufacturing, distributing, transferring, selling, or purchasing” a semi-automatic firearm with a detachable magazine will be limited to those who complete a state-certified firearms safety course. Before this, sellers did all the background checks themselves. Now the state will be taking over the task of making sure that everyone who buys a gun knows how to handle it. At least people who don’t already have them.
“ What happens is anyone can still own them, but it requires them to register these firearms and take a separate course with the local sheriff. So they’re not gone, and millions upon millions of guns are already grandfathered into this,” Ethan Stupka, an employee with the gun rights advocacy and legal group US LawShield, says. “So to me, that’s leaving a huge loophole, which is kind of their point.”
It’s not exactly the end of the world for a place like this, but it is a deadline. A lot of the frustration and ire directed at gun regulation is inscrutable to those on the other side of the debate. Being here, I kind of get it. These things are fun. It’s fun to hold an AR15, to talk shop about the internal mechanisms of a Heckler & Koch MP5k or listen to people debate the virtues of one model of receiver over another. There’s a culture here that is raw, practical, quintessentially American in all the good and bad ways.
“ Some of the best guns I’ve ever bought have been out of the trunks of somebody’s car. So I didn’t always have to go into a shop, so I don’t see how they’re gonna control everybody,” Fred Teasdale, a Colorado resident attending the gun show with a friend, says.
That sense of Americanness is part of what makes Tanner so fascinating to someone like me, who isn’t American. There’s a deep, somewhat unwholesome sense of history here. A little past the aforementioned Zastava, an M72 LAW rocket tube sits barrel agape at the ceiling. A display piece, as the seller informs me. I ask whether I could take down a helicopter with that kind of ordnance. He makes a face. I could never hit a helicopter with something like that. I’d want something like a FIM-92 Stinger, a favorite of the Afghan Mujahideen for claiming Soviet helicopters in the 80s.
One of the most appealing things about this place is that it allows you to toy with these things without being judged. It allows you to toy with the idea of being heavy, of being ungovernable by anything that can be shot to shreds with 7.62. Of course, America hasn’t been that kind of civilization for well over a century by now, but the epigenetic memory of a time when the Feds packed the same heat as everyone else lives on. That’s another good reason why people here find the idea of SB25-003 so offensive. It’s another nail in the coffin of America’s most ancient equality, that of violence.
“ It’s not a reasonable regulation at all because the government itself will refuse to do the same thing that they expect us to do, which is turn in all of our assault rifles and the high-powered stuff,” Jonathan Williams, an Air Force veteran and gun dealer at Tanner, said.
Strolling even further along the desk, I encounter a display full of bolt-actions, breech-loaders, winchesters and antique revolvers. Here’s a Springfield M1892, the type of gun that Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders might have used to beat down the Spanish at San Juan hill, or the soldiers of the American China Relief Expedition might have used to mow down Boxer rebels in the streets of Peking. Here’s a Carcano rifle that could have been used by an Italian sniper to pick off Austrians on the Isonzo front, or maybe not unlike the one allegedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Compared to the rest of what’s on display all around, this stuff is mere ephemera. Still, these are the guns of cowboys, guns that won the civil war and avenged the USS Maine. These guns killed the native. These guns made empires. Now they’re quaint oddities next to humanity’s latest instruments of death. Even the ones that still function are mostly legal without prior safety training under SB25-003.
After a while of walking around the place, it becomes a little too easy to pass everything off as a sort of intriguing anthropological oddity. I walk between decorative hedgerows of machine guns, absent-mindedly chuckle while staring at my foot down the sights of a hot pink Colt M1911 and exchange pleasantries with one seller displaying a souvenir 1933-34 Nazi party banner (the older banners from before the ‘34 purges are especially valuable collectors pieces). All of this sort of serves as a marker of where I am, and what these things mean here. It’s all different symbols of power, the kind of raw power that radiates from the barrel of a gun.
SB25-003’s central proposal – that the average gun owner should have to prove to the state they’re fit to pack this kind of heat – is of course a hard sell to the Tanner crowd. In American gun culture, owning a gun (responsibly, of course) is often already clear proof in itself that you’re ruggedly individual enough to wield the power of life and death.
Of course, considering that 77% of mass shooters purchase guns legally, a sheriff-issued permit and a 12 hour state-mandated gun licensing course could conceivably go a long way in preventing tragedies. That doesn’t stop it from being an inconvenience and an annoyance to prospective buyers.
“ I don’t wanna have to take all these classes and spend all these hours, ’cause I’m a working guy. Between this and my other job, I’m doing almost 60, 70 hours a week,” William Shaffer, a new Colorado resident representing his home insurance company while scouting around for his first gun at Tanner, says. “Like, I don’t wanna have to take time to go take a gun safety class. I’ll take one if I have to get a license, but one time should be all you require, and then once you’re taught how to handle a gun, why do I have to go back?”
For gun sellers, especially small gun sellers, the challenge posed by SB25-003 is more serious. Due to the added training requirements, many are anticipating a significant dropoff in sales for at least several months and seriously hurt business. With 1,600 gun sellers across colorado – one of the highest per-capita concentrations of gun dealers in the nation – there’s plenty of people who stand to lose a lot of money from this.
“ It’s gonna destroy businesses, possibly my business,” Keith Ellis, a federal gun dealer at Tanner with his company 30 Black, says. “ It’s taken people who obey the law, and it’s punishing them once again. Nobody that goes around shooting people is doing background checks on the firearms that they’re using to shoot people. So once again, Colorado lawmakers are punishing the law-abiding citizens for the deeds of the non-law-abiding citizens.”
So naturally, a lot of people would prefer to have the old system kept in place, where gun dealers are responsible for background checks. There is also the question whether these classes are indeed even adequate to make the good people of Colorado into responsible gun owners.
“From our perspective, we want people to be safe. We want them to be educated. That’s our job,” Stupka says. “From someone who used to teach concealed carry classes, these eight-hour courses are not making good shooters. They’re filling out the requirements.”
Disregarding the impending effects of SB25-003, Tanner is a fascinating, to some perhaps troubling, exposition of something at the very core of America. The effect of such a high concentration of lethal weaponry is hypnotic. Part of the human brain reacts to this place on a primal level. And it is pretty cool after all. In a kind of evil sort of way, but nonetheless. That’s part of why the idea of a new law telling everyone to abide by an overarching safety standard carries such a sour note. After all, where’s the fun in that?