Aurora

Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee advanced a fetal homicide bill Wednesday night that, for limited use, would write “personhood” language associated with the hardline anti-abortion movement into state law.

Aurora, Colorado, was the setting two summers ago of the horrific movie theater that made national headlines. It is also home to high-level everyday gun violence. Aurora has a 4 percent higher murder rate than does the country at large. Yet, its stance on gun rights and restrictions is nuanced (and often confused). Just don't tell that to the NRA, which is blanketing the city with Mike Coffman for Congress mailers.

Almost unnoticed, something remarkable happened in Colorado over the last month: The common sense gun safety regulations passed in the wake of the Aurora and Newtown massacres survived despite attempts to overturn them. Once again, Colorado’s legislature has achieved what Congress could not. The gun safety laws made in Colorado have stayed in Colorado.

It is too soon to know why it happened or exactly how it happened. But we know this: A man walked into the Navy Yard in Washington D.C. Monday morning and killed at least 12 people and was himself killed.

Some details of the just completed election, both here in Colorado and in other swing states, have gotten lost among the cheers of a progressive mandate, the whines of Republican obstructionists, and the phony cries of crisis over the contrived "fiscal cliff".

President Obama and Mitt Romney will face each other Wednesday in their first presidential debate at University of Denver, just 15 miles from the site of the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. However, the media's interest in the largest shooting in the country since Virginia Tech has waned, while both Romney and Obama have backed away from offering any new solutions to deal with the nation's gun homicide rate, which far outpaces any other developed country in the world.