Columns

The Colorado legislature adjourned May 8 after completing the work of the first session of the 69th General Assembly. Highly contentious issues and partisan wrangling characterized the session. Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the governor’s office after a two-year period in which control of the legislature was split, as Republicans controlled the House in 2011 and 2012 by a narrow 33-32 margin.

Most Americans over the age of 40 grew up with an omnipresent fear of nuclear war. Fear might be too weak a word — terror is more like it.

When Democrats claimed control of both houses of the Colorado General Assembly in last November’s elections, there was little doubt that two priority issues would be enacted once the legislature convened. Just over halfway through the 120-day session, bills to establish civil unions and to allow illegal immigrants who matriculated at Colorado high schools to receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities in our state have passed.

As a student living on Chicago’s south side in the early 1990s, I understood that the beginning of spring brought not only warmer days, but the sound of gunfire at night. Sometimes it would be the single shot from a handgun, and occasionally it would be the “pop-pop-pop” of a semi-automatic weapon.