Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and several national gun-rights groups are suing Superior over the town’s new stricter and more comprehensive gun safety laws and, in turn, challenging a Colorado law giving local governments the authority to regulate firearms.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court, names the town and Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle as defendants. Along with Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the lawsuit was filed by the National Association for Gun Rights, the National Foundation for Gun Rights and Superior resident Charles Bradley Walker.

Superior Mayor Clint Folsom declined to comment, citing the pending lawsuit.

The Superior Town Board voted unanimously in June to pass its gun ordinances in response to mass shootings across the country, including the deaths of 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school.

The new ordinances repealed the article in the town’s municipal code regarding possession and use of weapons, replacing it with updated regulations that address assault weapons, large-capacity magazines, trigger activators and the purchase and sale of firearms in Superior.

In the lawsuit, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners argues the Superior ordinances “banning standard capacity magazines and semi-automatic rifles” are unconstitutional.

“Superior’s anti-gun ordinance flies directly in the face of our right to keep and bear arms, and we’re not going to stand idly by and let this town — or any other rogue government — trample on our right to self-defense,” Taylor Rhodes, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners executive director, said in a written statement.

The lawsuit cites a U.S. Supreme Court decision last month that struck down a component of New York’s concealed carry law. The decision held that governments can regulate, but cannot prohibit, the public carrying of firearms by law-abiding citizens for purposes of self-defense, according to reporting by the Washington Post.

According to the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners lawsuit, that Supreme Court decision established that “the standard for applying the Second Amendment is the text, history and tradition of the right to keep and bear arms; thereby, invalidating the lower court rulings’ justification for gun control.”

“Given the Bruen decision, the ludicrous ordinances passed by Superior, Boulder, Boulder County, and frankly, the 2013 Colorado standard capacity magazine ban are all just waiting to be challenged,” Dudley Brown, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and the National Association for Gun Rights president said in a written statement. “None should be able to withstand the new rules established by Justice Clarence Thomas.”

Along with Superior, the Boulder, Lafayette and Louisville city councils also approved gun violence prevention ordinances in June, while the Boulder County commissioners are considering such ordinances. So is the Longmont City Council.

No lawsuits have been filed against those communities.

State law was changed last year in response to the shooting at the Table Mesa King Soopers in Boulder in March 2021. Colorado Senate Bill 256 allows local governments to regulate firearms — and removed a previous provision that prohibited towns, cities and counties from enacting ordinances governing guns.

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