Almost everything written about legal challenges to SB25-003 — including our own coverage of Del Toro v. Polis — is really coverage of one thing: a federal Second Amendment claim. That's not an accident of reporting. It's because that's the firearms-right claim pleaded in the pending federal lawsuit. But Colorado has had its own, separate right to bear arms written into its constitution since statehood, independent of the federal one. In the reported cases and publicly available SB25-003 pleadings we reviewed, we did not find an Article II, Section 13 claim against this law.

Quick housekeeping: Section 2 isn't about this

Colorado's constitutional "Bill of Rights" is Article II, and a reader asked us specifically about Sections 2 and 13. Section 2 is worth clearing up first because it's easy to assume it's arms-related and it isn't: it's the state's popular-sovereignty clause — "the people of this state have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves... and to alter and abolish their constitution and form of government." It's about the people's authority over their own government, not firearms. Section 13 is the one that matters here.

What Section 13 actually says

"The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question; but nothing herein contained shall be construed to justify the practice of carrying concealed weapons."

This has been part of the Colorado Constitution since 1876. It's textually different from the Second Amendment — narrower in some ways (it's framed around defense of home, person, and property, and it expressly says the provision does not justify concealed carry), and it has its own body of state precedent. Federal Second Amendment decisions may inform a Colorado court and establish a federal constitutional floor, but they do not control the separate state-law analysis under Section 13.

The "reasonable exercise" test, and the cases that built it

Colorado courts don't apply the federal historical-analogue test from Bruen to Section 13 claims. They apply something called the "reasonable exercise" test, developed over nearly a century of Colorado Supreme Court decisions:

***People v. Nakamura* (Colo. 1936)** is the earliest application identified by the Colorado Supreme Court. The state had barred unnaturalized foreign-born residents from owning any shotgun, rifle, or pistol. The court struck it down, holding that the state "cannot disarm any class of persons or deprive them of the right guaranteed under section 13, article 2 of the Constitution, to bear arms in defense of home, person, and property." The court found the law's real effect — not just its stated purpose — was what mattered.

***City of Lakewood v. Pillow* (Colo. 1972)** struck down as overbroad a local ordinance that, among other things, made it unlawful to possess a firearm in a vehicle or place of business for self-defense purposes.

***People v. Ford* (Colo. 1977)** addressed an as-applied challenge to Colorado's felon-in-possession statute. The court treated the statute as facially valid but held that Section 13's protections "must be superimposed on the statute's otherwise valid language." It recognized an affirmative defense when competent evidence shows the possession was for defense of home, person, or property, and remanded the case for that factual issue to be tried.

***Robertson v. City and County of Denver*, 874 P.2d 325 (Colo. 1994)** is where the test got its modern shape. Denver had banned roughly 40 specific firearm models as "assault weapons." The Colorado Supreme Court upheld the ordinance, emphasizing that the city's interest in public safety was genuine and that evidence showed roughly 2,000 other firearms remained available for purchase and use in the United States, leaving ample alternatives for self-defense.

***Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Polis*, 2020 CO 66, 467 P.3d 314 (Colo. 2020)** is the most recent Colorado Supreme Court decision applying the test, and it's directly relevant here for a reason beyond the legal standard: it upheld Colorado's 15-round large-capacity magazine limit against a Section 13 challenge, and the plaintiffs brought no federal Second Amendment claim. The court used the case to spell out the test explicitly:

"[T]he government may regulate firearms so long as the enactment is (1) a reasonable exercise of the police power (2) that does not work a nullity of the right to bear arms in defense of home, person, or property."

The court was careful to distinguish this from ordinary rational-basis review: it requires an actual legitimate purpose, not just a conceivable one, and it draws a hard line against any law whose purpose or effect is to make the right meaningless — even if the law is otherwise a rational policy choice.

Two tracks, never combined — at least not yet

Here's what stands out when you put these cases side by side with the current litigation. The right-to-bear-arms claim in Robertson arose under Section 13, although the case also included other constitutional challenges to the ordinance. Rocky Mountain Gun Owners presented a Section 13 claim with no federal Second Amendment claim. Del Toro v. Polis — the live federal challenge to SB25-003 — pleads federal Second and Fourteenth Amendment claims, not a Section 13 claim. Colorado litigants have used both tracks before, but we found no reported decision or publicly available pleading applying the state track to SB25-003 specifically.

We don't know why. It could be a deliberate strategic choice — the federal Bruen framework has been favorable to plaintiffs challenging gun laws elsewhere in the country, and a legal team might reasonably bet on that track first. It could be that Section 13's own precedent, including a 2020 loss on a related restriction, made the state claim look like a weaker bet. Or it could simply be that nobody's gotten to it yet. That's speculation on our part, not something we can confirm.

Would it change anything? Genuinely unclear

It's worth being honest about how different SB25-003's permit-to-purchase scheme is from anything the reasonable-exercise test has actually been applied to. Robertson and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners involved a model prohibition and a capacity limit — bright-line rules where a court could examine how many practical alternatives remained. SB25-003 instead conditions certain purchases and transfers on a process involving a sheriff-administered background check, an eligibility card, course availability, fees, and time. Whether a multi-step administrative burden like that "works a nullity" of the right in the way Nakamura and Robertson used that phrase is a real, untested question under Colorado's own constitutional test. We found no reported Colorado decision addressing this particular kind of burden under Section 13, and we're not predicting how a court would rule.

Bottom line

Colorado has an independent, textually distinct right to bear arms in Article II, Section 13, with its own nearly-century-old body of case law and its own legal test — one we found no reported court decision applying to SB25-003. The pending Del Toro challenge relies on federal constitutional claims rather than Section 13. Whether that reflects a deliberate strategic choice, the relative strength of existing state precedent, or something else, we genuinely don't know. It's one more reminder that "is this law being challenged" and "on what grounds" are two different questions, and the second one matters.

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