10th Circuit Slaps Colorado: Unserialized Gun Ban Fight Lives On

The appellate court handed Second Amendment advocates a critical procedural win Thursday—and the ruling carries a message Colorado's gun-control machine did not want to hear: surviving SCOTUS scrutiny on a federal rule does not automatically save a *state* ban from constitutional challenge.

The Tenth Circuit reversed the lower court's denial of injunctive relief against Colorado's unserialized firearm possession ban. The district court must now take a hard second look at whether Colorado can keep enforcing that prohibition while the case continues through the courts.

**That's not a small thing. That's the lifeline this challenge needed.**

Colorado's law criminalizes possession of unserialized firearms—guns that predate federal serialization requirements or were legally home-built before any registration mandate existed. Gun owners who followed every rule on the books when they built or acquired these firearms are now felons under Colorado's scheme. No new crime. No victim. Just a retroactive declaration that your legal property makes you a criminal.

The state's anti-gun apparatus had been counting on courts to rubber-stamp the restriction the way they've rubber-stamped so many others. The Tenth Circuit told them that math doesn't work here. Federal appellate courts are required to apply Bruen's text-and-history standard—and Colorado's sweeping possession ban has a serious problem surviving it.

This ruling doesn't end the fight. It sends the injunction question back down with fresh instructions. But it denies Colorado the easy procedural kill shot it was banking on—and it keeps real constitutional pressure on the ban.

**Watch the next move closely.** If the district court grants the injunction on remand, Colorado gun owners could get actual, immediate relief from this law while litigation grinds forward. And that sets up a much bigger circuit-level battle: can any state criminalize possession of unserialized firearms at all?

The Tenth Circuit refused to let a sloppy district court ruling bury a live Second Amendment challenge. Now the lower court has to do its job—properly, this time.

Gun owners in Colorado: stay locked in and back the organizations carrying this fight. The courtroom is still one of the few places holding the line—and today, that line held.