(1) The general assembly finds and
declares that:
(a) Colorado needs consistent and reliable funding from the state to sustain
the services crime victims depend on, including wraparound services, housing
assistance, legal advocacy, emergency shelter, long-term safe housing, case
management, on-site crisis response, emergency financial assistance, counseling,
and more;
(b) Inconsistent and fluctuating funding hurts victim and survivor service
providers alike. Many agencies are already working beyond their means to attempt
to meet the growing needs of victims and survivors in their communities.
(c) Over the last several years, agencies have made the difficult decision to
downsize due to a lack of funding while, at the same time, more victims and
survivors are seeking existing services and more complex levels of services;
(d) Access to a firearm makes it five times more likely that a woman will die
at the hands of an intimate partner. Every month, seventy women nationwide, on
average, are shot and killed by an intimate partner. Over thirteen percent of women
in America alive today, around twenty million women, have been threatened by an
intimate partner using a firearm. In the United States, between 2014 and 2019, sixty
percent of mass shooting events were found to be domestic violence attacks or to
have been perpetrated by those with a history of domestic violence.
(e) Additionally, individuals experiencing trauma due to gun and other types
of violence, including military veterans and at-risk youth, need support to access
mental health services in order to recover from their trauma and reclaim their
health. Currently, there are significant barriers to access to mental health services
in Colorado.
(f) Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Colorado ranked in the bottom half
of all states with regard to the prevalence of mental illness in the state relative to
access to care. Since the pandemic began, the Colorado crisis services hotline has
received thirty percent more calls and texts than in previous years, and the
psychiatric emergency department at children's hospital in Colorado has treated
ten percent more children experiencing thoughts of suicide. In 2021, one-third of
Colorado youth reported experiencing feelings of sadness and hopelessness for a
period of at least two weeks or more.
(g) In Colorado, a gun suicide death occurs every thirteen hours. During an
average year, six hundred seventy-seven people die by gun suicide and seventy-three percent of all gun deaths in Colorado are suicides. Colorado has the tenth
highest rate of gun suicide in the United States. According to the United States
department of veterans affairs, the veteran suicide rate in Colorado is significantly
higher than both the national average and the national general population suicide
rate. The Colorado board of veterans affairs has reported that current resources are
inadequate to meet the needs of the nearly four hundred thousand veterans in
Colorado, and Colorado is expected to experience a thirty-nine percent increase in
service needs in the near future.
(h) In Colorado, over half of all gun deaths among children and teens are
suicides. According to the Colorado department of public health and environment,
suicide is the leading cause of death for youth and young adults, persons aged ten
to twenty-four years old. Black children and black teens are five times more likely
than their white peers to die by gun.
(i) The excise tax on the net taxable sales of firearms dealers, firearms
manufacturers, and ammunition vendors for retail sales in this state is analogous to
longstanding federal law, which has, since 1919, placed a ten to eleven percent
excise tax on the sale of firearms and ammunition by manufacturers, producers,
and importers;
(j) Revenue from this federal excise tax has been used, since passage of the
federal Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act in 1937, to fund wildlife
conservation efforts that remediate the effects that firearms and ammunition have
on wildlife populations through game hunting, particularly through grants to state
wildlife agencies, and for conservation-related research, technical assistance,
hunter safety, and hunter development;
(k) This article 37 will similarly place a reasonable state surtax on firearm
and ammunition industry members that profit from the sale of firearms and
ammunition in order to generate sustained revenue for programs that are designed
to remediate the devastating impacts of these products on families and
communities across this state;
(l) The National Rifle Association has referred to the federal excise tax
scheme as a legislative model and friend of the hunter, and the National
Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) has repeatedly emphasized the importance of
this federal firearm industry excise tax as well. A 2019 statement by an NSSF
director published on the NSSF's website emphasized that an often overlooked,
and certainly under-communicated benefit, is the impact that excise taxes on
firearms and ammunition have on conservation and wildlife populations, and a
similar 2018 statement from NSSF praised Key Pittman and Willis Robertson, the
legislators who sponsored the federal excise tax, as heroes of the most successful
conservation model in the world.
(m) This article 37 will similarly provide dedicated revenue to sustain and
expand effective gun violence prevention, healing, and recovery programs for
families and communities across Colorado, particularly in communities most
disproportionately impacted by gun violence;
(n) This article 37 is consistent with our nation's longstanding historical
tradition of regulating commercial firearm and ammunition manufacturers and
sellers, including through federal, state, and local taxes on this commercial activity.
An 1883 California statute, for instance, directed local governments to provide for
payment of all revenue assessed as a tax, or received for licenses, on the storage,
manufacture, and sale of gunpowder and related products in order to fund a
Fireman's Charitable Fund to support professionals tasked with remediating the
collateral impacts of firearm-related commercial activity on public safety through
fire risk.
(o) In the historical record, other states, including Mississippi (1844), North
Carolina (1857), Georgia (1866), Alabama (1867), the then-independent kingdom of
Hawaii (1870), Nebraska (1895), Florida (1898), Wyoming (1899), and Virginia (1926),
have similarly enacted longstanding commercial, occupational, or other taxes on
those selling, purchasing, or possessing firearms and other dangerous weapons;
(p) The tax proposed in this article 37 mirrors the federal excise tax on
firearm and ammunition industry participants and is similarly dedicated to funding
programs to remediate the direct costs to individuals and communities resulting
from the accessibility of firearms and ammunition in this state.