CO Gun Restrictions Lead to Cancellation of Shooting Competition

There are more welcoming venues

A regional shooting competition that would have brought hundreds of folks to Montrose later this year has been scrapped—a direct casualty of new Colorado gun laws set to kick in just a few days before the competition, organizers say.

Local members of the International Defensive Pistol Association—a group with more than 17,000 members in at least 50 countries worldwide—had been planning a regional championship for July 4-6 at the San Juan Shooting Range in Montrose.

But new, well-publicized firearms restriction laws recently passed in the Colorado Legislature are scheduled to be in force starting July 1. That put the competition's organizers in a bind.

"I've been working on this for a long time," said Grand Valley resident Walt Proulx, event coordinator for the IDPA.

"But I needed to see if we could … in good conscience recommend that people come from other states and other countries without fear of running afoul of the law," he said. "We just decided that, there's just no way for us to be sure, and we'd be better off to just cancel it."