boulder

The Boulder City Council unanimously passed a sweeping gun control ordinance last week banning “assault weapons” and bump stocks, even as a pro-Second Amendment group threatened to retaliate by suing individual council members.

The bill comes after several other state and local governments have passed contentious gun-control measures in the wake of the February mass shooting at a Florida high school.

Boulder defines assault weapons as “semi-automatic firearms designed with military features to allow rapid spray firing for the quick and efficient killing of humans.” Also included: “all semiautomatic action rifles with a detachable magazine with a capacity of twenty-one or more rounds,” as well as “semiautomatic shotguns with a folding stock or a magazine capacity of more than six rounds or both.”

Those possessing assault weapons already can keep them under the law, but owning bump stocks and high-capacity magazines will be become illegal in July. Certain law enforcement and military personnel are exempted from the ordinance.

During the public comment period for the legislation, the nonprofit Mountain States Legal Foundation promised to sue the city for “violations of the Second, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments,” as well as the Colorado Constitution, Fox’s KDVR-TV reported.

“We’re going to see a lot of court cases coming before us,” Councilwoman Mirabai Nagle said despite voting for the ordinance. “I think that we’re going to spend a lot of time and money. It’s not that lives aren’t worth that, but I think that there was a better way of going about this…I don’t agree with this ordinance in many ways,” Nagle added. “It’s not perfect.”

The proposed ordinance led to protests last week, with some pro-Second Amendment activists carrying long guns openly in the streets, according to local reports.

The Boulder City Council tweeted Tuesday that it would soon consider additional amendments to the ordinance, such as raising the age to buy a firearm.

Originally reported by www.foxnews.com