COLORADO'S GUN
PERMIT LAW
ISN'T WORKING.
ITS AUTHOR IS
ON THE BALLOT.

Adam didn't sit in on the hearings and didn't follow the amendments. He owns a gun shop in Salida, and on July 20, 2026, the morning Colorado Parks and Wildlife opened the application system, he signed up for the card. The website worked. The hunter-safety verification stalled because a digit had rubbed off the license he keeps in his wallet. Someone called, the number got fixed, and then the waiting started. As of the recording on September 1 he had spent about a hundred dollars in hard costs, been the first applicant in his county, and was still waiting on a training class. Forty-three days in, no permit to purchase.

He is careful to separate the agency from the law. CPW staff, he says, have been "incredibly educational" and did their job. The problem is upstream. Sheriffs were handed the program without funding or instructions, and a county-by-county tracker showed 27 of 64 sheriffs with no published program at the end of August. Dana Charles told a family version of the same story: her son in his twenties finished every class for a concealed-carry permit, then waited five, six, seven months because one person at the sheriff's office issues them. "Unintended consequences to the laws that are being passed," she said, "have a real effect on actual people's lives."

Neither guest has held office, and both lead with it. Charles spent about 25 years running medical practices in Pueblo and is a fourth-generation Coloradan with four kids in their early twenties, all of them pricing a life somewhere else. Lammon has lived in Colorado for 29 years and in Aurora for 14, sold the insurance agency she ran for more than a decade so she could campaign full time, and describes herself as boots on the ground. Lammon calls the pair "a couple of spicy moms." Charles puts it more plainly.

Senate District 3 · All of Pueblo County

Dana Charles

Healthcare practice administrator. Fourth-generation Coloradan. Open seat, running against Aaron Gutierrez (D). Her issues: affordability, public safety, Medicaid reimbursement and the specialists leaving Pueblo.

danacharles4colorado.com ↗

Senate District 27 · Centennial & SE Aurora

Danielle Lammon

Former insurance agency owner, nonprofit volunteer, four adult children and two grandsons. Running against Sen. Tom Sullivan (D), who sponsored the permit law. Her issues: fees, crime, and getting subject-matter experts into the room.

danielleforsd27.com ↗

Adam asked the question most viewers have: what does a state senator actually do, and why do these two races matter to someone in Salida or Grand Junction? The answer is arithmetic. There are 35 seats. Democrats hold 23. Twenty-four is two-thirds, the margin it takes to override a veto or refer a constitutional amendment to the ballot without a single Republican vote. If Republicans lose one more seat in November, that threshold is met. Hold both of these and it isn't.

Pueblo shows how thin these margins run. The 2022 race for this seat came down to 1,705 votes. In 2013, Pueblo voters recalled their own state senator, Angela Giron, over her gun-control votes and replaced her with a Republican. Charles brought it up unprompted: "This is not an R or D issue, but it really becomes a right issue." She also noted Giron is back on a ballot this year, running for county commissioner.

Lammon's specialty is the fee stack. Register a car in Arapahoe County, she says, and you'll count about 15 line items, each one a tax that never went to voters because TABOR only requires a vote on taxes. Fees get parked in enterprises. Her example from the shop counter is Proposition KK, the 6.5 percent excise on firearms and ammunition sold as veterans' mental-health funding. Pyrost checked the statute: of roughly $39 million a year, $5 million goes to veterans, about 13 percent. The rest is split among crime-victim services, children's behavioral health and school safety. Adam compared it to the marijuana tax: "There's no line item. Hey, this is where it went."

The totals are bigger than most voters assume. Enterprise revenue hit $28.2 billion in FY25, layered on top of a state budget signed at about $47 billion. Lammon counted the rulebook too: Colorado carries more than 205,000 state-level regulatory restrictions. "Do you feel like you need 200,000 policy regulations to run your business on a day to day?" Charles, who has managed healthcare teams for two decades, said the state has a spending problem and questioned cutting behavioral health and Medicaid reimbursement while specialists leave Pueblo and patients drive north for care.

Her sharpest example was a water heater. It used to be a trip to Lowe's and an installer. Under the state's electrification mandates, she said, a retrofit can run thousands of dollars, and families end up choosing between the appliance, the mortgage and groceries. "Good intentions, not nefarious," she said. "But the reality is unintended consequences." Lammon's fix is procedural: put subject-matter experts from every affected industry in the room before a policy is written. She was shocked to learn, business after business, that it isn't happening now.

Adam was blunt about his own community: hunters, shooters and churchgoers who don't turn in a ballot. Both candidates landed on the same close. Charles: "With social media, people think their most powerful tool is to get online and be a keyboard warrior. Social media has replaced the power of voting." Lammon: "And not voting has consequences." Nobody on the tape told you how to vote. All three told you to do it. Adam also flagged Amendment 84, the Constitutional Right to Hunt and Fish, certified for this ballot on August 20 with more than 145,000 valid signatures. His case: let the biologists do the biology.

One correction for anyone who wants to help: the maximum individual contribution to a state Senate campaign is $225 per election, $450 per cycle, and gifts of $20 or more are itemized by name. Lammon put mailers at about $1.25 a piece and her target at 80,000 households. Do the math on what a $20 gift buys.