Colorado's Gun Control Quarrel Illustrates How The Hickenlooper Way Might Fare In A Partisan Preside

[brooklynite]

Colorado Public Radio

Back on March 20, 2013, Gov. John Hickenlooper took a seat inside his Colorado Capitol office as he prepared to sign some of the most contentious bills of his time in office. A large picture of a rural mountain landscape covered the wall behind him. Democratic lawmakers and families of gun violence victims crowded around him.

Applause erupted as he put pen to paper on a package of gun restriction measures — a ban on large capacity magazines and private sale background checks — that came to define his first term in office.

Among the witnesses that day was Jane Dougherty, a Colorado woman whose sister had been killed months earlier in the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Next to her stood Sandy Phillips, whose daughter was killed in the Aurora theater shooting.

Hickenlooper, invoking the 2012 theater mass shooting, told the assembled witnesses: “We have signed today several bills that materially will make our state safer in the long-run and allow us to begin to address some of these issues head-on.”

[shanny]

1. iirc that bill resulted in 3 or 4 state representatives being recalled