Colorado Senate Bill 26-043 would require background checks, dealer transfers, and five-year recordkeeping for the sale of a simple metal tube — a move critics say is a textbook step toward de facto disarmament.
Colorado Democrats are pushing legislation that would regulate firearm barrels — the metal tube the bullet travels through — as if they were complete firearms. Under Senate Bill 26-043, selling or transferring a barrel to a fellow gun owner without routing it through a federally licensed dealer would be a crime, carrying up to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine on the first offense.
This isn’t about suppressors, which are already federally regulated as NFA items. This isn’t about receivers. This is a barrel. A spare part that countless Colorado gun owners buy, sell, and swap without a second thought — and now legislators want the same paper trail you’d generate buying a complete firearm.
The bill would require dealers to log the buyer’s name, address, phone number, date of birth, driver’s license number, the barrel’s make, model, and caliber, the transaction date, and the name of the employee who handled the sale — the same paper trail created when purchasing a complete gun.
“The regulatory solution creates compliance burdens for 100% of law-abiding gun owners who make up the entire legitimate market for firearm barrels in the state.”
The stated justification is ghost guns. Colorado banned so-called ghost guns in 2023, but legislators say criminals are now 3D-printing frames and other components and purchasing legal metal barrels online to build untraceable firearms. The problem with that logic? By the bill sponsor’s own account, ghost guns account for approximately 3% or less of firearms recovered from Colorado crime scenes. A 3% problem is being used to justify 100% compliance burdens on law-abiding residents.
The Wyoming Loophole
Denver resident Keith Emerson told the committee what anyone with a map already knows: a criminal who wants a barrel can simply drive a couple of hours to Wyoming and buy one without any Colorado paperwork whatsoever. The bill creates zero barrier for anyone willing to cross a state line, while creating new criminal exposure for every honest Coloradan who doesn’t.
Anti-gunners’ answer to that argument, as always, is that Wyoming should be doing this too. It’s never the law that’s the problem — it’s everyone else’s freedom that needs to be curtailed.
Insulated From Voters
Perhaps the most troubling procedural detail: the bill contains a “safety clause” that designates it as emergency legislation. In Colorado, that designation exempts the bill from the citizen ballot initiative process. If SB 26-043 passes and Governor Polis signs it, there is no referendum — no direct democratic challenge by the people it would affect. It’s locked in.
Death by a thousand regulations
Colorado has added a new layer of gun control in every legislative session since 2019 — waiting periods, age restrictions raised to 21, ammunition purchase age requirements, extreme risk protection order expansions, detachable magazine permitting requirements, and now barrel regulation, alongside a companion bill that would ban 3D printing of gun parts and criminalize possession of even the digital instructions to print them.
No single bill bans guns outright. But each year the regulatory web gets tighter, the cost of compliance grows, and the risk of innocent mistakes steepens. Map it across seven years, and the picture is unmistakable: this is how you disarm a population without ever using the word “ban.” You regulate. You criminalize transfers. You decide what counts as a gun. You do it one small, “common sense” step at a time until eventually, a lot of people just give up.
“Colorado and the other 49 states are all policy laboratories — and the experiments that succeed, or fail depending on your perspective, will get exported to other states, as they always have.”
Colorado gun owners should be contacting their state legislators now. And gun owners in every other state should be paying close attention, because what starts in one purple state rarely stays there.
What else has Colorado tried to do to the Second Amendment?
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