CU’s FIPI looks at Colorado’s Safe Storage and Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) laws. Governor Polis’ continued assault on local control. Courage is virtuous.
CU’s FIPI looks at Colorado’s Safe Storage and Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) laws
I mentioned in an earlier newsletter that I’d signed up for a webinar by the CU Medical School’s Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative on implementing Colorado’s ERPO laws and safe storage for guns law. I recorded the webinar to share with you, but it turns out they posted it online. The first link below is to a Youtube recording of the seminar.
The second and third links are one-sheeters provided by them on the two laws (in the same order I wrote above).
I’ll leave it to you to watch and/or read to see their full take on the policy. If you were curious to know, for example, how many charges were brought under Colorado’s safe storage laws, you can find that (short answer without extra context is 118 Safe Storage cases filed between April 2021 and December 2024 for homes, and 0 for vehicles).
I wanted to point out two things with regard to the intersection of public health and guns.
The first is an illustration of what value there is in using public health concepts to understand gun safety. Screenshot 1 (from the one-sheeter on safe storage) is not the only example, but it’s as good as any.
In screenshot 1 you see the results of a survey they did to check Coloradans’ awareness about the safe storage gun laws. This is, as I have written before, an appropriate use of public health machinery with regard to gun safety: knowing what people know about state laws, knowing what they know about safe gun practices, help direct finite resources to places where they would have the most impact.
The second thing to point out is the opposite. If you scan in to the 13:17 mark in the YouTube video you will hear the following (transcribed by me from the video):
“This plot on the right shows that the cases involve the following groups who were accessing the firearms. So about half the records show that it was a child who was accessed or who had access to the gun or firearm. And then I will note that there’s a big caveat here that about half of records there, it was unknown whether it was a child an unauthorized person who had access to the firearm, so there’s definitely a gap in our knowledge based on what was reported in the case files. But you can see that again this is not mutually exclusive, so in some cases a child and a prohibited user were both involved in a case.”
The figure the presenter is referencing is attached as screenshot 2.
It’s the circled bar graph on the right where a charge under the safe storage law involved a child accessing the firearm 51% of the time, a prohibited possessor (someone not legally able to posses a firearm) 15% of the time, and 47% of the time it was unknown who got ahold of the firearm.
The presenter notes that (as you can see in the quote) there is some overlap here and there might be cases where both a child and someone prohibited from accessing the firearm got access. The “unknown” part of the graph is made up of this and/or any records that were incomplete.
Later on, the presenter goes on to say that these two charts together illustrate the potential benefit of the law to keep children safe. Transcribing again:
“One last thing I will say about that is that together I think these findings are demonstrating that, you know, many of these charges involve children. We see that in both the plot on the left, and the plot on the right, and/or in high risk households where child abuse might have been occurring. So I think this demonstrates the potential benefit of the law in protecting children which is the point of the law.”
You see the graph. You see what the explanation of it is. Do you agree this shows the potential benefit of the law in protecting children?
I see a lot of holes. I see a lot of things we don’t know. I do not see the throughline the presenter does from the figure on the left to the right. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying the law is doing nothing. I am saying I’m not willing to make the leap the presenter does. It’s too far.
That’s the problem with what groups like Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative are doing. They are making too-definitive claims from incomplete data. They stretch a study’s result far beyond what you can realistically claim.
All too often, it’s “it seems to be working” instead of “we really don’t have a clear sense of whether this is working”.
Another example comes from the last page of the ERPO one-sheeter. Quoting:
“Are ERPOs effective in reducing firearm involved violence? Research suggests that for every 10-15 ERPOs granted, one suicide death can be prevented. Ongoing studies are looking at if ERPOs prevent mass shootings, homicides, and other firearm-involved injuries and deaths.”
This is a rehashing of a claim made by deeply flawed research (a similar claim was made by the Attorney General’s office and I cover it in an earlier newsletter linked fourth below). The flaws in that research are, as you might figure from the above, not discussed anywhere in that sheet. It’s the God’s honest truth.
The nature of the research done here (from simple statistics gathering as per the video to the kind of synthetic experiments done to bolster the claim about suicide and ERPOs) put strict boundaries on the conclusions that can be reached. This doesn’t mean that there is no place where the machinery of public health can help, I gave an example above. It does mean there are places where it can’t.
At about the 00:30 mark in the YouTube video, the video conference facilitator makes the following remark (a pretty common one I’ve heard since watching both the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative and other groups working in public health and guns):
“...the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative does not support or oppose specific legislation or make policy recommendations. Rather the goal of our policy implementation research is to provide objective evaluation and data about how the policies that have been passed in Colorado and elsewhere are being implemented and used.”
If the people using public health to study gun violence wanted to be trusted, they would do well to be more forthright in what their field can do and what it can’t. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. CU’s Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative doesn’t live up to their own standard.
**I have seen at least one paper where the current director in the past has endorsed specific policy.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://medschool.cuanschutz.edu/docs/librariesprovider58/fipi/2025-state-of-the-policy-brief_erpo.pdf?sfvrsn=ad13f4b4_1
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://medschool.cuanschutz.edu/docs/librariesprovider58/fipi/2025-safe-storage-state-of-the-policy-brief-(10-14-2025).pdf?sfvrsn=408bc5b4_3
Governor Polis’ continued assault on local control
I’ve written a few posts in recent memory on how Governor Polis really isn’t a fan of local control. Well, let me qualify that. He is on some issues, but for those where he feels he knows best, sorry but what you want, how you want to live, don’t matter.
The City of Littleton provides us another example. There is a disagreement down there about density mandates and about zoning. The City initially moved to use a new law (passed by Dems and signed into law by Polis) to toss a stumbling block in the path of citizens who wanted to exercise their right to initiative in the Colorado Constitution.
More in the op ed below.
https://completecolorado.com/2025/10/21/littleton-land-use-fight-assault-on-citizens-intiative/
Related:
Not too long after my op-ed above ran, I noticed the Colorado Sun’s celebration of government power linked below.
The headline just about says it all: “It’s hard to build housing in Littleton. When the council tried to make it easier, residents revolted.”
Yeah, that’s not taking sides at all!
Courage is virtuous
That time of the week again. Last post til Sunday and thus it’s time for something interesting, something not related to politics.
I recently finished reading (in as part of mini book club with a friend) the “Courage” installment of the stoic virtues series by philosophy author and stoic Ryan Holiday.**
The book was decent; it was, to me, more Tony Robins then Epictetus. What stuck out more than the book itself was a poem quoted near the end.
The poem is Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life”. I link to the poem in full at bottom.
The part quoted in the book was:
“Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.”
An excerpt which obviously carries the theme of you being an inspiration to courage for another. Looking at the poem in total, however, brought to mind another theme.
I am not sure about you but I find it to be remarkably easy to be cynical, almost to the point of nihilism. It feels to often as though this is expected: to be worldly-wise, to not be seen as naive, one must be this jaded.
This poem struck me as a call against that sort of perspective. A much needed call, frankly. I don’t regret being who I am and I don’t see a need to be any less skeptical or cynical, but (in keeping with the other stoic virtue of temperance) there needs to be room for a belief in greatness. There needs to be room for zest. For a belief that the things around you are fantastic and worth fighting for.
Our children watch us from a young age to see how they ought to face their world. I hope I prepare my young one to not be an easy mark or doormat, but I hope too that she sees the greatness around her too.
That’s it for today. If you know someone who could profit from some encouragement, send along the poem below.
See you back at it Sunday!
**The four stoic virtues are what you see in the image: courage, wisdom, justice, and temperance.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44644/a-psalm-of-life
Thanks for the CU Medical School’s Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative webinar. I'm reluctant to attend anything related to "firearm injury prevention" because the lies, distortions, and misinformation make my teeth hurt. I've asked both that CU Initiative and the state OGVP to see if they track whether accidental gunshots were the result of guns obtained from the black market, the point being that it's naive to think that criminals would abide by safe storage. The one response was no. There's the claim that ERPOs have resulted in a 10% reduction of gun deaths, a number Everytown For Gun Safety pulled from the air. Here in Colorado, ERPOs have had no effect reducing gun suicides or gun homicides.