For thirty-seven years Denver has banned the AR-15 within its city limits. For thirty-seven years it has been the only Colorado city to pull off that trick — protected by Article XX of the state constitution and a 1994 Colorado Supreme Court ruling that left the ordinance standing. This morning the United States Department of Justice sued to end it.
They sued Denver. Good. The 16th Street Mall has spent a generation pretending that the most popular rifle in America is so dangerous that the city has to wave home rule at it like a crucifix. Federico Peña signed Ordinance 669 in October 1989, six months after a MAC-11 rampage in Littleton, and not a single shooting in the thirty-seven years since has been prevented by the language his council voted into the books. Denver's own police chief admits as much: of roughly 2,100 firearms recovered by the department last year, fewer than forty were the so-called assault weapons § 38-130 was written to keep off the streets.
The reason Denver gets to do this — when the rest of Colorado either couldn't or wouldn't until 2021 — is Article XX, the constitutional grant of home-rule authority that the Colorado Supreme Court used to bless the ordinance in Robertson v. Denver back in 1994. That was 28 years before NYSRPA v. Bruen. Twenty-eight years before Rahimi. Eighteen years before McDonald incorporated the Second Amendment against the states at all. The precedent is a fossil. The DOJ is handing it to the federal courts so someone can finally check whether it still walks.
What follows is the case file. The statute itself, line by line. The constitutional argument the city has hidden behind for three decades. The 1994 decision, the 2021 preemption repeal that opened the floodgates for Boulder, Boulder County, Louisville and Superior to copy the playbook, and the federal complaint filed this morning in the District of Colorado. Read the facts. Make your own call.
Title II, Chapter 38, Article IV, Division 2 — Weapons and Missiles. Passed by Denver City Council on a 9–4 vote in October 1989, signed by Mayor Federico Peña, and effective on 14 November 1989. The ordinance has been amended once materially since: in January 2018 to add bump stocks. It has never been repealed.
Two pieces of legislative bait-and-switch are baked into that paragraph. First, "rapid rate of fire" — a phrase that does no work unless you intend it to mean any rifle that cycles a round per trigger pull, which describes more than half of rifles sold in America. Second, "designed primarily for military or antipersonnel use" — a finding the city makes for itself, by ordinance, without testimony from a single firearms designer or military procurement officer in the legislative record. The Stoner platform was drawn up for the civilian market in 1958. Eugene Stoner did not work for the Pentagon. He worked for ArmaLite. Denver wrote what suited Denver.
The grandfather clause is the part nobody talks about. It exists. It is on the books. But the registration window closed essentially the day the ordinance took effect, and the permit registry is confidential under municipal code, which means even asking how many grandfathered owners exist runs into a privacy wall the city itself built. The practical effect is a population frozen on 14 November 1989 with no path to add to it.
Every conversation about Denver's gun laws collapses into one question: how did this survive 18 years of statewide preemption? The answer is one provision of the Colorado Constitution, ratified in 1902, that nobody outside the state bar quotes correctly.
"Such charter and the ordinances made pursuant thereto in such matters shall supersede within the territorial limits of said city or town any law of the state in conflict therewith. Such charter and the ordinances made pursuant thereto shall extend to all its local and municipal matters."
The Colorado Supreme Court has carved firearms regulation into three buckets. Local concern — home-rule city wins. State concern — state wins. Mixed concern — both can legislate so long as they do not directly conflict. The court ruled in Robertson that Denver's assault-weapon ordinance fell into the mixed category. The state had not preempted it in 1989, so it stood. When the legislature finally tried to preempt in 2003 — codified at C.R.S. § 29-11.7-103 — Denver sued. Denver won. The 1989 ordinance continued in force.
From 2003 to 2021, no other Colorado city could enact what Denver had. Boulder tried in 2018 and got struck down by the Boulder County District Court in March 2021 — ten days before the King Soopers shooting, in which a man bought a Ruger AR-556 pistol six days before murdering ten people in a grocery store. The same week a state court invalidated Boulder's ordinance, someone who could not have legally bought that pistol the prior week murdered ten people with it. The legislature took the hint. SB21-256 dropped within sixty days.
What state law said: A local government "shall not enact an ordinance, regulation, or other law that prohibits the sale, purchase, or possession of a firearm that a person may lawfully sell, purchase, or possess under state or federal law." That is a statewide preemption clause, full stop. What the Denver carve-out said: Article XX is in the constitution, and a statute can't override the constitution. Denver's pre-existing ordinance was protected by the home-rule grant, not by any dispensation from the legislature. The Denver District Court agreed. The Colorado Supreme Court left that result undisturbed. The ordinance kept running.
Decided 2 May 1994. Cited as 874 P.2d 325 (Colo. 1994). Opinion by Chief Justice Luis D. Rovira. The case Denver has waved at every challenger for thirty-two years. Plaintiff David Kopel — yes, that Kopel — did not lose all of it. He took out the worst part. But the spine survived.
Affirmed: § 38-130(b)(1)(c) — the "assault pistol" subsection that defined banned pistols by their design ancestry (i.e., pistols "designed from" certain ancestor military firearms) — void for vagueness. The court reasoned that the provision required a person "to learn not only what guns their pistol was designed from, but also . . . the design history of the ancestor guns." That is, the ordinance asked a normal person to be a firearms historian to avoid criminal liability. It did not pass.
Reversed: the trial court's holding that § 38-130 as a whole was unconstitutional. The Colorado Supreme Court held the ordinance did not violate Article II § 13 (the state right-to-bear-arms clause), was not impermissibly overbroad, and was within the city's police power. Result: the feature-based prongs — magazine capacity, folding stock, semiauto shotgun — survived.
The opinion was decided fourteen years before Heller, sixteen years before McDonald incorporated the Second Amendment against the states, and twenty-eight years before Bruen demolished interest-balancing in favor of text-and-history. Robertson is doctrinally a fossil. It has not been overruled by a Colorado court because no Colorado court has had to decide whether the federal Second Amendment, applied through the Fourteenth, blows it apart. That is precisely the question the DOJ has now teed up.
"Local Regulation of Firearms." Senate Third Reading 19–15. House Third Reading 39–24. Signed by Governor Jared Polis on 19 June 2021. Colorado became the first state in the country to broadly repeal firearm preemption. Five home-rule cities and one county tried to copy what Denver had been doing since 1989.
The bill replaced C.R.S. § 29-11.7-103 with language that allowed local governments to enact firearm restrictions more restrictive than state law, but not less. It also empowered them to ban concealed carry on government property and college campuses. Polis signed it ten weeks after King Soopers. The political reaction was immediate.
Read the table closely. Every single copycat is in court. The two that drew TROs collapsed within months. The three that are still standing are doing so because federal judges are picking apart their ordinances piece by piece — sale here, possession there. Only Denver, the original, has been allowed to operate without a federal injunction. The DOJ is no longer willing to grant that exception.
Then came SB25-003. Signed by Gov. Polis on 10 April 2025. The legislature finally found a workaround: ban manufacture, distribution, sale, transfer and purchase of covered semiauto rifles, shotguns and gas-operated pistols statewide unless the buyer obtained a Colorado Parks & Wildlife "Firearms Safety Course Eligibility Card." Sale prohibition takes effect 1 August 2026. It's not a ban. It's a permit. That distinction will matter when the federal courts read it next to the Denver ordinance.
From the constitutional grant of home-rule authority to a federal complaint in the District of Colorado. Every load-bearing date from 1902 to today.
Filed this morning in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. Lead counsel: Acting Chief Barry Arrington of the DOJ Civil Rights Division's Second Amendment Section. The first federal-court challenge to § 38-130 since Bruen. The first time the United States itself has been the named plaintiff against a home-rule city's AW ban.
The complaint is built on a "common use" argument straight out of Heller and refined by Bruen: AR-15-style rifles are "in common use for lawful purposes by law-abiding citizens," and a categorical ban therefore fails Second Amendment scrutiny. The DOJ pleads an estimated 16 million owners nationally. Denver is alleged to have engaged in a "pattern or practice" of unconstitutional conduct in enforcing § 38-130 since 1989.
The use of 34 U.S.C. § 12601 as the statutory hook is unusual and will be the first thing Denver attacks. The statute was enacted in the wake of the Rodney King beating to give the Justice Department civil-rights authority to sue police departments engaged in patterns of misconduct. Denver's response is already drafted: this is not a misconduct statute, this is a constitutional- interpretation dispute, and § 12601 doesn't reach it. That fight will eat the first six months of the case.
The DOJ's 28 April demand letter went to three addressees: Mayor Johnston, Governor Polis, and Attorney General Phil Weiser. Weiser's response, delivered yesterday, refused to repeal HB13-1224's 15-round magazine cap, citing the 2020 Colorado Supreme Court ruling that upheld it 7–0. That demand is parked. The DOJ has not, as of filing, sued the state. The next move is the state's.
The City Attorney's Office's own records, obtained by 5280 Magazine. The Denver Police Department's own enforcement totals, recited by Chief Ron Thomas at yesterday's press conference. Hold the ordinance up against its own data and ask what it is doing.
The 18-arrest figure is the part that should embarrass everyone who has spent thirty-seven years insisting that the AR-15 inside Denver city limits is an existential threat. Eighteen arrests in nine years. Two arrests per year. That isn't a city tolerating a small nuisance. That is a city not enforcing its own statute except when the firearm shows up incidental to some other crime. The function of § 38-130, in its operating reality, is a stacking charge. It is not a public-safety measure. It is a sentencing enhancement.
The Chief's own number — fewer than 40 of 2,100 — is volunteered as evidence the ordinance is working. Read it the other direction. Thousands of firearms were used in Denver crimes last year. The category that the ordinance exists to suppress comprised less than two percent of the haul. The other ninety-eight percent was something else. If Denver's gun problem is real, and it is, § 38-130 is not the part of the city code addressing it.
The case will be decided in the District of Colorado, almost certainly appealed to the Tenth Circuit, and quite plausibly heard by the U.S. Supreme Court within twenty-four months. Three roads lead out.
The District Court rules that 34 U.S.C. § 12601 does not authorize a "pattern or practice" suit over constitutional interpretation. Case dismissed for failure to state a claim. DOJ appeals. The Tenth Circuit decides whether § 12601 reaches a city ordinance at all. This is the most likely first-round outcome.
Court reaches the merits and applies Bruen. AR-15s are held to be in common use; § 38-130 lacks a historical analogue to a categorical possession ban; ordinance enjoined. Denver appeals. Tenth Circuit affirms. Robertson joins Friedman v. Highland Park in the dustbin.
Circuit follows the Fourth Circuit's Bianchi v. Brown (2024) and concludes the Second Amendment does not protect AR-15 possession at all. Ordinance survives. SCOTUS takes cert to resolve the circuit split that already exists between the Fourth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits on the same question. That case decides the issue nationally.
The procedural question is what makes this case unusual. The DOJ has chosen a statute the federal courts have never used in this context. Either the courts accept the framing — and DOJ gets to use the Civil Rights Division as a Second Amendment enforcement arm against any state or city in the country — or they don't, and the DOJ has to refile a more conventional § 1983 case through individual plaintiffs. The first six months of the case will be about which it is. The substance of the ordinance is the back half.
Denver's ordinance has always been the academic curiosity of American gun law. The one home-rule carve-out. The one ban old enough to predate every piece of modern Second Amendment jurisprudence. For thirty-seven years it has run quietly because it could rely on three things: a pre-Heller Colorado Supreme Court ruling, a state-constitutional shield, and the political reality that no federal administration was going to sue a city over a 1989 statute.
Two of those three are gone. Robertson is now a fossil from a doctrinal era that the Supreme Court has explicitly repudiated three times — in Heller, in McDonald, and in Bruen. The state-constitutional shield does not reach federal claims; it stops state law cold but says nothing about the Fourteenth Amendment. And the political reality changed today. The federal government is now a plaintiff. Denver gets to defend the merits of its ordinance for the first time in a Bruen-aware court. That is a genuinely new situation.
This case is not really about Denver. Denver is the test case. If § 12601 sticks as a vehicle, the next twenty defendants are Boulder, Boulder County, Louisville, Cook County, Highland Park, every city and state with an AW ban on the books. If § 12601 doesn't stick, the DOJ refiles individual-plaintiff cases and the question gets decided the slow way. Either way, the post-Bruen drift toward striking down categorical AW bans accelerates. The fight that Bianchi was supposed to start at the Supreme Court — and didn't, because cert was denied — is being teed up again.
Mayor Johnston is half right and half wrong. He is right that Denver has the political authority to defend its own statute. He is wrong about what the statute has actually done. Eighteen arrests in nine years is not the load-bearing public-safety policy he is pretending it is. Forty assault-style firearms out of twenty-one hundred is not what is hurting the city. The thing § 38-130 accomplishes, in 2026, is that it lets the city tell its base it has done something. The thing it doesn't accomplish is preventing what it was written to prevent. That is the case Denver is now going to defend in federal court.
The ordinance has been operating on borrowed legitimacy since 23 June 2022. The bill has come due. Read it carefully, watch the docket, and remember which side of Bruen you sit on. The next two years are going to settle a great deal more than what AR-15s do or don't do inside the territorial limits of the City and County of Denver.