 Welcome to the backstory on gun safety, both storage and reporting of lost or stolen firearms in Longmont. My name is Tim Waters, and as a volunteer for Longmont Public Media, I host the backstory. And those of you who have watched any of the backstories, you know, we pick off topics that we think to be relevant and interesting to the community and bring together experts, activists, policy makers, difference makers in Longmont to come around a topic and participate in a conversation mostly through an interview. So today, this is the first, this is the first episode of the backstory in which I'm joined by a co-host, the Reverend Sarah Barasco, the senior minister at the United Church of Christ in Longmont. Sarah, as a co-host, welcome Sarah. I'm looking forward to this session and in subsequent sessions around the topic, right, the theme of violence reduction and gun safety. So this would be the first, this won't be the last on which we'll work together. I'm going to introduce our guests here in just a second, but I do want to settle a context for viewers to understand we're coming together in this conversation. Emotions are still raw following the shooting in Boulder and, you know, what continues to happen across the country. And while we're not going to, we're not going to dig into that issue, causes of it, we understand that provokes, again, like so many other incidences, questions about what can we do as a community to move forward, to reduce risks. And it just so happens, and that's what this conversation will be about, just so happens that the state legislature has passed a couple of bills that the governor has signed with that being the interest, not taking guns away from people, but how do we reduce risks of either intentional or accidental shootings when guns are around. So with that purpose in mind, I want to introduce Ann Noonan. Ann is a longtime Longmont resident. Ann, how long? I moved here in 97, Boulder County in 78 and Longmont since 97. Longtime Boulder resident, Boulder, longtime Longmont resident in Boulder County. And Ann has been active in mental health and substance abuse issues for a long time. Jeff Satter, who I'll introduce in a minute, could describe how Ann has contributed in number ways to our diversion programs in Longmont, including our Angel Initiative. So good on you, Ann, and our Public Safety Department for embracing that whole concept of diverting people from the criminal justice system. And Jeff Satter. Jeff is our Deputy Chief of Police Services in Longmont. I think probably everybody in Longmont knows Jeff because of his work and because of his profile and visibility in the community. Jeff, is it 31 years that you've been? 32 now. 32 years. So I think you got to wrap your mind around that. 32 years of service to this community. That's pretty awesome. So welcome to the two of you. Sarah, before we jump into questions, do you have any kind of introductory thoughts or comments you want to share? Well, I just want to say it's great to be in this conversation, Tim, and I want to thank you for sharing this platform. I'm excited about what we're going to cover. And I think that Longmont has a long history in its commitment to public safety and public education. And I'm just glad to be a part of that story. All right. Well, welcome. And here we go. So let's get started with the General Assembly in Colorado has passed two bills. The governor signed them both, as I understand it. This is very new legislation and people are trying to wrap their minds around exactly what it means and how it's going to be enforced. Part of what we wanted to do today is start to educate Longmonters about those issues and questions of how our own public safety department will enforce this and how we can support them and what are the opportunities for people to take advantage of some resources that are available. Let's just tee it up by why would any legislature pass legislation like the two bills that have been passed in this session? Safe storage and lost or reporting of lost or stolen firearms, just to start with the basics. Jeff or Ann, you want to just start with what your thoughts are? Go ahead. Well, Jeff, I was going to say, why don't you start with the legal piece of it? Because I'm not as familiar with that. I'm really happy about the legislation, but you know more about the details of it. All right. Well, as you know, there's the state safe storage bill and then the failing to report or failure to report lost or stolen firearms. The failure to report a lost or stolen firearm is not yet law. It has been signed, but the way it won't come into effect until 90 days after the general assembly is closed, and then if somebody introduces a bill that could ask for it to go to an election. So it's not quite in effect yet has been assigned, but that's on failure to report lost or stolen firearms. Probably the more important one is the safe storage, and that just requires homeowners to secure their firearms in some sort of mechanism that either keeps it out of the hands of juveniles or keeps it out of the hands of prohibited persons who are ineligible to possess a firearm. And there's a couple options into it, but mainly you got to have your guns locked up and you should be the only key holder if you have children or people that cannot possess or legally own a firearm in your house. So Sarah has put into the chat box links to both pieces of legislation. I think Jeff earlier shared a resource, a link that we might want to share as well. That's a suicide prevention website as we get further into the conversation. So one of these is going to become law, one of these likely to become law, but there's another step or two. And the rationale behind these kinds of bills is what, Jeff? Why would legislators, and why from a law enforcement perspective, or from a mental health and substance abuse experience, the work you've done, what's the thinking behind legislators for this kind of legislation? So I think there's a number to reduce theft of firearms to prevent some of those impulsive decisions that juveniles may make that are suicidal. And having access to a firearm is, you know, when they use a firearm for suicide, it's almost always successful. So to keep those out of the hands of people that are thinking about that. And then the people that are prohibited possessors, you know, to keep it out of the hands of people that don't have the right to own a firearm right now and may or may not be using those firearms in crimes. I think that's the whole, whole intent behind the bill. And it does take effect on July 1st of this year. So we'll get into, we'll get into some more specifics about at least what the current thinking is from a law enforcement perspective about how these get enforced, because that's going to be the big question. So what is, so what we know what the what is, then the so what is how these get enforced. I want to just remind viewers of this program, these laws are passed and will now be implemented in the context of a community that's been in some serious conversation about what we do together to reduce risks. And some viewers may remember in the fall of 2019, a group of community community members came together in what was called the Respect and Safety Cafe, both respecting the Second Amendment and trying to address reduction or increase of safety reduction of risks having around firearms. And from that event, there was a report that was presented to city council. There were four areas in that report that kind of organized all of the input from the community into four categories. One of those categories was education. And this program really is kind of square in the center of that that area of common ground educating. So that's how we're going to spend our time. The others are our general reduction of violence, advocacy and mental health. And Sarah and I will continue to explore how we host these conversations about both educating in the other areas as time goes by. But it's a community that's been a serious conversation. Some people who are watching this will point to me for just a moment. People know that I sometimes wear a hat as a city council member. That's not my role in this conversation. But I did introduce a resolution and it was not uncontroversial in the minds and hearts of gun enthusiasts. And I understand the views. But it was a vigorous, I think a healthy conversation then to hear all the views along a continuum from gun enthusiasts to folks who simply don't own and wouldn't own weapons, that we've invited the range of perspectives without trying to take anything away from anybody, but add to knowledge and add to the repertoire of moms, dads, gun enthusiasts, psychologists and law enforcement experts on how do we protect ourselves. And going forward it's going to be up to us, not to somebody else to do that. So with that, I want to just before we get into specific questions about this acknowledge that we haven't done much research in this country on the relationship between policy and you use the firearms or risks, think of this as reducing risks of gun violence connected to some policy initiative. So things like the resolution that I mentioned made recommendations to policymakers, things we can't do at the city level, but somebody might be able to do, much of what has already been done in that much of what was listed in the resolution had already been addressed by the Colorado legislature. But I want to ask if you thought about this, when we call on one another to do something, seems to me we ought to have a better understanding of what the something might be grounded in evidence that something works. We haven't done much research in this country and we haven't done it because Congress has prevented it. They've been prevailed upon by lots of advocates to prevent it. But if there was an opening, right, if there was a chance to frame questions about what should be the kind of questions we'd like to see researchers considering or studying, any quick responses to what you think we ought to be researching as questions and links between between policy and behavior or policy and reduction of risks of gun violence? Well, the first thing I would say is I'd want to see the data pulled about access to lethal means. As Jeff pointed out, when someone uses a gun to attempt suicide, they're highly likely to die. And so if we had less access to the lethal means, would that change that people taking an overdose and then being able to be found and revived, you know, different types of suicide attempt? We do know that in the West we have higher rates of completed suicide and we conjecture that that's because of access to guns. But we don't actually know that that is, we need the hard numbers and facts on that. Yeah. Jeff, anything occur to you? I agree with Anne. I think we also have to just be careful with the balance because there are millions of gun owners that are good people that, you know, they secure their firearms, they do their best to keep the firearms out of the hands of criminals. And I think we just got to recognize some gun laws are not going to keep guns out of criminals' hands. That's true. And Jeff, what I would say is these laws in particular are to keep them out of children's hands, to keep them out of teens who are impulsive, to keep them out of the hands of folks that are depressed. And, you know, what we know is that folks have, research shows that for many people, there's a five minute gap between the decision to commit suicide, the decision to take an act of self-violence and the action itself. And so if we can delay that, if we can bridge that, make it longer, then we're going to reduce the number of deaths. And so if there's not, you hear of kids walking in the door from a bad day of school, they walk up to the dad's closet and it's over. But if they didn't have access to that gun, there might be a lot of other ways that we could intervene before that fatal outcome. I agree. And that's where the safe storage is so helpful. Jeff, in the link that you sent, and I think we'll include in the chat box, maybe this is a good time to do it, the resource, the website on suicide prevention, at least one of the personalities that are featured and shared on that website. I think the number that I'm calling accurately is that there are 400 suicides by gun every day in this country. And that's the behavior that Ann's talking about, trying to create enough of a delay that maybe there's a way to intervene or a little more thinking that occurs. There's been 600 suicides by gun in Colorado in 2019, 600. And that's up almost 25% over the previous three or four years. So Sarah has posted that website for folks who might want to, and we probably ought to put that, flash that back up there from time to time because it disappears and for people who watch this and might be interested in what that resource is and what it looks like. Can I just address one of the comments that Jeff made? I think it's really important to look at it that there are millions of people who own guns and manage them safely. And so it's a reality that we have guns in our culture and our society. And so really looking at this from a public health perspective, just like we have millions of people that have cars in our society and we have lots of rules around safety with cars. And so it's a similar approach here. It's not an all or nothing. It's not a black or white. It's really what are some steps that we can take to reduce risk to create distance between something that's lethal and something that's less lethal and really thinking about it in much more nuanced tones. Well, let's talk about from aspiring to see more safe storage in less access to actually enforcing a law. Jeff, I know it's early. There's no case law. Judges haven't, this hasn't had judicial review. So it's pure speculation. But the conversation, if it hasn't started, we'll start soon. I'm certain within our Public Safety Department about so you get a law like this. How do you enforce it? Any early thinking from your perspective on how a law like this gets enforced? Well, it is a class two misdemeanor, but I'll throw out, unfortunately, my belief is it's probably going to come at the expense after a tragic incident or something like that, because we're not going to go door to door. There's what 38,000 homes in this community. The police is not going door to door. How we will learn that a gun was improperly stored is unfortunately when we come on one of those incidents where the gun was used or they report the theft and it's like, well, how was it stored? Well, it wasn't locked up. So those are going to be how they come to our attention because we can't go to the door. And the tragedy behind an improperly stored gun and now your child has used that weapon to kill themselves, charging somebody with that is going to be the least of their concerns at that point. I don't think anybody would advocate maybe charging somebody with that if that happened, because the family is going to have that tragedy and nobody wants to compound that, but we do want to remind people there are ways to safely store firearms and prevent some of those. And I think that's the point, Jeff. And it's the reason we're here talking is there's this new law starting July 1st. First of all, there are people that will start following the law just because there is a law. It's kind of like with masks. A lot of folks were kind of on the fence about masks, but until there was actual rules about it, that made more people put it on. And then having an event like this where we're talking about it, it provides that education and that level of awareness. I think most people really do not understand that a family member is much more likely to be killed by a gun in the home than a crime to be prevented. And so getting out the numbers about the rates of accidental deaths with young children, three-year-olds, a friend of mine lost her niece and a three-year-old niece in one of these events. So we don't really publicize those kinds of things enough. And Jeff, you're right. It's a terrible tragedy and you're not going to want to go in and arrest somebody for that, but you are going to need to let use that as a point of education, like we do with safety belts, like we do with masks, like we've done with other public health data. Sarah, you ready to jump in here? I am. I am. Because I think, you know, what I want to jump in with first is a statement that says, you know, the messaging is, this is what responsible gun ownership looks like now. And safe storage saves lives, because it's not always your family member. It could be the incident that I'm most familiar with is two friends playing together. And it was the friend who didn't live there that ended up dead. And you bet those parents of the dead child wanted somebody charged. And that's how this law came into being, because up until this point, up until the safe storage legislation came into being in other states, there was no repercussion or not safely storing a weapon. So we're moving in the right direction. And we need to just keep up with the times. I mean, car manufacturers made it easy. They implemented the changes into the design of the car. We still have to buckle up, but it's in every car. And so now with the sale of guns, this is also part of the sale process that it has to come with some kind of locking device. So so that's, you know, it's encouraging because the data we do know is that when where there are more guns, there is more violence. And that comes right out of the Policy Violence Center, this misunderstanding that more guns equals more safety, but does not prove to be true. So there's a lot more research to come forward. I want to jump in with some more questions if that's okay. Absolutely. Sounds and you've already touched upon a couple of these. But one of the things I want to touch on is there seems to be in this country, a connecting of mental illness and gun violence. And as, you know, as someone who's worked in this field for 35 plus years, does this pairing of mental health and gun violence seem valid to you? Well, we have to look at other countries, which have a very similar rate of mental illness. So if you look at Western Europe, our rates of mental health and diagnosable illnesses are relatively similar. And yet our deaths by gun violence are exponentially higher. So that's one piece of it. Even with suicide, folks often think if they committed suicide, they must have been mentally ill. And that's not the case. Many folks that commit suicide have no signs or symptoms of mental illness. It's an impulsive gesture. It's maybe they were intoxicated, didn't have a substance abuse diagnosis, but they were intoxicated and thus more impulsive. So there's not always a connection. And I think the sad thing about that assumption is it does two things. First of all, it stigmatizes that mentally ill people are more likely to hurt themselves or others. So that assumption is stigmatizing for folks. I don't want to say I have a mental health issue because that's what people will think about me. But the other thing it does is it puts it at arm's length. It puts the problem of gun violence at arm's length. I don't have a mental health issue. My family doesn't have mental health issues. Therefore, we're safe and secure from this issue. And that's not the case. That's great. That's really helpful. And so Jeff, having heard that and knowing that all gun owners are responsible for violence and violence reduction and for safe storage, how should parents talk with kids about gun safety and storage and what specific things should they cover? I have a kid and one of the things I always reminded him is never show your friends where I keep my firearms. Just as one, I didn't want it stolen. And two, I didn't want his friends knowing where I had firearms in my house. Then I think having, if you have firearms in your home, you should do some training with your kids at least so they know how to handle it safely. Never point a gun that's at anybody, all the safety requirements, all guns are always loaded. The safety requirements. I really like the hunter safety course. Even if you don't hunt, they really do a nice job of explaining some of the dangers and concerns and making sure the kids know how to handle the firearms and use the firearms. Because again, that general knowledge of you never point your gun at something you're not willing to destroy, all guns are always loaded. So you know that when you, if you find a gun at a friend's house, you know to leave it alone. So the kids, they don't handle it, they don't, and if their friends pick it up, they skid out a lot of the house and go somewhere else that's safe. Because kids should not be handling firearms without their parents present. And so those little things go a long ways to helping keep kids safe. And then, you know, the most importantly is keeping your guns secure and having them in a safe location that your kids can't get access to, or the prohibited possessors, but keeping it in a safe location. And the state law just says it has to be locked up and secure. So they're not saying you need a multi-million dollar safe. They're just saying they need to be in a safe, secure location. And, or they can have a gunlock on them too. And, yeah, and I think that making the actual statement that they need to be locked and secured, because you'll hear a lot of families talk about, well, the kids didn't know where it was. It was hidden. We never told the kids where it was. Kids always know where it is. They know where the ammunition is. They know where the weapon is. And so taking it that next step. Go ahead, Sarah. I'm just going to listen to your questions. Yeah, well, I was just going to say, you know, I see a lockbox behind you, Jeff. And I think it might be helpful for you to demonstrate just how quickly people can have access to their firearm. And this, this is a lockbox that I have at my house. My wife got this for a birthday present. I could tell you I'm a sleepwalker. And years and years and years ago, when I first got into policing, I had my gun on a cabinet near my bed. And one day I woke up and I couldn't find it. And I had got up in the middle of the night, sleepwalked with that gun, and I put it behind the TV on the floor. I have no idea why, but I put it on there and I was like, all right, enough of that. I put it away in a location where I had to at least be aware of before I could access that thing. And so there's a variety of reasons. Just for myself, it's scared to heck out of me. I think I'm walking around in my house, sleepwalking with a firearm. Who knows what was going on in my mind at that point. But I don't remember anything. But this is just a simple gun safe. Let me hide it for a second. But that's how quick it opens. And I've got, I brought a firearm in the day with a lock in it. Now the law just requires you have the gun inside a locked box. And then you would want to mount that to a shelf or something like that so it can't be removed. But here's one of the free gun locks that we give away at the police department. You can get three per family if you're a Longmont resident. And I would assume other cities have these. And you just, this will go through a shotgun, the slide of a shotgun. You can, there's different ways you can use this. Now you don't need it locked inside the case. It's extra safe that way. But if you're a person that uses your firearm every day, you can throw your whole holster and your firearm in that lock box. And then if you need it, it's a quick code and you're in your box. And then they make, obviously, bigger and bigger gun safes that hold rifles and multiple rifles and things like that. This is just one simple example of quick access. If you know the argument, oh, I might need it for protection. Well, this is quick access. It's as quick as anything if you ever needed it. But it keeps it secure from your, your children and people that can't possess it. Now, could someone break into that? They could do that very easily. But again, the lock just requires it to be locked and secure. And then under the reporting, you would be aware that it got broken into. So I hope it's not that easy to break into it, Jeff. I mean, this is not, this is not a four knocks fault either. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. And I know that we're also now adding to the list, you know, parents, parents talking to other parents about this, what would you suggest parents say to other parents so that the topic of gun access is conversational? Yeah, I, you and I talked about this a little the other day. I think first of all, knowing where your kids at, knowing who they're hanging out with, that's always a good thing. And she's been in this business a long time. And I'll just, you know, sex assaults on children don't happen from strangers. Sex assaults happen from somebody that you know in your family and that or somebody, a neighbor or a friend or a cousin or a relative, the same with gun violence, you know, you need to talk to your friends and know who they are and talk to them about some of, hey, you know, you should know if your friends have guns in their home. It's an easy conversation, but you need to know your kids friends and interact with them. And that will go a long ways to keeping your kids safe for a variety of reasons. Just prescriptions, you know, where do they store their prescriptions at their house? There's so many different things you should be talking to your kids about that we could go that could be a probably a four day show. We go on and on about kids safety, but you know, stranger danger. It's not the strangers. It's going to be someone known to the kid and the same with gun violence, you know, you've got to know your you've got to know the friends, the parents of your kids friends. I think it's the safest way. And so maybe maybe just a simple question of, you know, did you do you understand that there's a new law or did you notice that there's a new law that you have to keep all firearms stored and locked? Are you practicing that at your house? Yeah, I think that's a simple conversation. Okay. And you know, again, modeling the behavior to if you're a gun owner, you should be modeling that behavior for your kids and and people that come to visit your house. You know, Jeff, the I don't know how I don't know how sensitive or touchy the topic of you know, safe storage might become. I'm never the right judge of what's the hot issue or not. I keep picking up things that feel like hot issues that I didn't know were going to be hot issues. And then become and you get burned. But that said, every month, one of your commanders spends time with the Neighborhood Group Leaders Association. And, you know, you might pass along to Commander Brown or whoever would be the representative of the next meeting. This wouldn't be a bad reminder to NGLA members for for them to take back to their neighborhood group meetings, HOA meetings to say, hey, these are new these are new bills that have been passed. And at the grassroots level, they're only going to get, we're only going to see compliance and increased safety if people do this on a voluntary basis, you know, at the neighborhood level. And that's the maybe it sparks the conversation we're talking about right now, neighbors neighbor neighbor. And it always surprises me. You know, Tim, you're in you're always monitoring what's going on in our community, paying attention to the new stuff, paying attention to new laws, but not everybody does that. So I mean, there's probably thousands of people in our community to have no idea about this safe storage. And we got to get the message out. And I know from the police department, we're putting it up on Facebook. But we only have what 15,000 people or something that pay attention to city has another 15,000. So that's we've 70,000 people in our community that may not get the message. So we got to find ways to advertise this. Well, hopefully this this program will get wide viewership. It'll be part of the education. You know, and Jeff, I also want to go back to sort of the the statistic that I should not the statistic, but the policy violence center. There seems to be a real misunderstanding that guns equals safety. And I have two friends that bought a camper, and they thought to themselves, well, you know, now we're going to feel a little more vulnerable going to different campsites. Should we get a gun? And they asked somebody that question, someone who's in law enforcement. And the person law enforcement said, Well, I have two questions for you. First of all, are you willing to use it? Because you can't just have one, you have to be willing to use it if you have it. And number two, are you going to be willing to go through the ongoing training that it'll take to own a weapon like that? And these that sort of didn't strike them comfortably. So they said, Well, no, I don't think so. And so the question then becomes, well, what are some alternatives to guns to increase someone's safety in the event that they find themselves in a situation where they feel threatened? What would you suggest? I'm a fan of pepper spray. And you know, works well on dogs. It works well. I don't know how well on bears. I've never tried it on a bear, but they say it does. But it works well on dogs. It works well on bears. And they make a pepper spray that comes out in a cloud kind of so you don't even have to be very target specific. And once you get in their eyes, it burns. I teach for a company that you sell pepper spray to law enforcement. Having used it over the years, it's a great alternative to a firearm, I think. It's easy to carry. It's lightweight. And it can protect you while you're hiking on a trail if an aggressive dog came by or a coyote or, you know, again, you know, there's other things for bears, but it's something. And it's easy to use. And it's very nominal, you know, 15 bucks at the most 20 bucks for some pepper spray. So I think that's a great tool. You know, there's some taser like devices out there. You know, the problem with those is you got to get too close to the individual. So anything you can do to stay away from somebody in great distance is in your favor. And so that's why I like pepper spray over some of those devices. Yeah, it's a good device, but sometimes you got to get a little close with some guns and things like that. Okay. Okay, great. Spray and run. Spray and run. Right behind is you're running down the trail. Yeah. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. Ann, I want to just go back to you for a moment. I think you've already sort of said something about impulsive behavior and suicide and made a statement that said, you know, safe storage is going to help this because if we can delay access, there's going to be live saved through safe storage. There's one other thing that you mentioned to me once in a conversation. You used the term family fire. And that was new to me. Can you explain what that is, please? And how safe storage can help reduce accidents? You know, you hear the term friendly fire, right? That folks in war can be just as easily killed by friendly fire as by from the enemy. And I think family fire brings that home, so to speak, that the death could be by someone you love or it's someone you love who could die from this firearm. And so whether it's a child having an accident because they're playing with it, whether it's suicide, it's happening in your home within your family or a friend or something. So to me, I use the term so that we're not as casual about it, you know, just so it has a little bit more impact. As people think about, we think of those episodes as being so rare, but suicide in particular is kills more people than opioid overdose and motor vehicle accidents, which we are very highly aware of. But we don't talk so much about suicide. So family fire, I think just caught my caught my heart in my ear when I first heard it. Yeah. Thank you. Sure. Are you kicking it back to me? Sure. Okay. We've been at this for a while. We know attention spans. We've probably we've probably gone beyond the the attention span of most most listeners, but people can watch this at their leisure and, you know, tune back in. I would be remiss if we if we headed towards a wrap up without asking a couple of questions like if if long monitors if others listen to this and would like to learn more, would like to get involved with with education opportunities, which is what this is about. Jeff or or and or Sarah, any suggestions of how how long monitors who might want to help with education or any of the other areas of common ground, how they might want to get involved or how they could get involved. I would just briefly say thinking of it as a public health issue and having conversations wherever possible. We listed things like, you know, the clubs, but PTA meetings, neighborhood and neighbor conversations and really education about prevention. You know, we do a lot of things to prevent harm to our kids and to each other. And this is just another area to be aware of. And it's okay to mention the word suicide when you if you're concerned about it, asking somebody if they're suicidal doesn't make them suicidal. So it's okay to talk to them about that and just be blunt. Right. And do you and do you have access to lethal means, right, having that conversation? Are you feeling suicidal? And do you have a plan? Do you have access to somebody's weapon? Again, doesn't make somebody act on things. And in fact, most times folks feel some relief that they're being given the opportunity to talk about those scary feelings and thoughts that they're having. Jeff, if somebody wanted to get access to some of those trigger locks that you mentioned, how would they do that? If they come to the Longmont Safety and Justice Center, top floor at the west end of the building under admin, we keep the locks in a box and they can get three per resident of the community. So if they're a rent, they need to bring an ID, we have, we're giving away three, we have a whole box of them right now. And I think probably every police department has some of these. I didn't look to see how much they cost, but I bet you they're not very expensive either if you wanted to buy them. And I'll just throw out, we have some great businesses in this town too that have some really nice gun storage, safe, you know, Murdoch's and there's a couple of firearms dealers in town. I want to encourage you to shop locally and hit those businesses up because they have some great ways of protecting your firearms and keeping your family safe. There you go. And I want to put in a plug for some folks at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Longmont. We're working on an initiative to actually just give away gun safes. We found some really great safes for $75 and we're going to team up hopefully with a local merchant and we just want to give them away because we want people to use them. And that's a great way to get attention and to let people know that this is now a law and to make it easy. And I think I want to just keep saying, let's just make it easy, make it easy to talk about these things by talking about it ourselves. Make it easy with the messaging of this is what responsible gun ownership looks like and here, here's a safe. Please use it because we believe it's going to help keep our community safe. So two things. One is they can go to the Justice Center and for free take home up to three trigger locks. And I would guess if a neighborhood group, an HOA or an organized neighborhood group wanted to invite somebody from the police department to a HOA meeting or to a neighborhood group meeting and talk about this, they could probably bring some of those gun locks with them to leave with residents. And then, Sarah, if people want to take advantage of the initiative you've talked about, they should follow up with you directly at the United Church of Christ. Yeah, they can. We're going to advertise it. It'll hopefully be sometime in July. I know it goes into effect July 1st, this new law, but we're looking at the middle of July and still working out the little details right now. But yes, contact me at UCC Longland. So there's a lot more learning that we're just early in the learning curve about what the law or laws, potentially both of them mean and require and what compliance, which will have to be voluntary. Hopefully it will because of Jeff, as you've described, trying to do this as a gotcha after the fact is just one catastrophe after another. So to the degree that we can motivate, educate folks to engage in the kind of practices that reduce risks of certainly accidental or stolen in an intentional use of a firearm, that's what this conversation hopefully advances. This is the first, not the last of these conversations. For the guests, both Anne and Jeff, thank you again, not only for your time today, but for what you do every day, day in and day out in service to this community. Sarah, thank you again. We're going to make several appearances together in this series for Longmonters. To the degree that we can share the backstory, that is the backstory on safe storage and reporting of lost or stolen firearms in Longmont. Thanks for allowing us into your into your viewing space.