Just as liberals like Nancy Pelosi tried to diminish the Tea Party in its early days as a corporate astroturf movement, the Left is at it once again trying to write off the anti-gun control backlash as somehow a big political ploy by Republican operatives.

Trust us — if it were this easy to draw massive crowds to Democrats’ town hall meetings, Republican operatives would be doing it a whole hell of a lot more often.

The anti-gun control uprising is grassroots at its most organic. Just ask any staffer receiving letters to the editor at newspapers across the state. Or legislators. Gun rights supporters are legitimately pissed at the Democrat-controlled Legislature’s attempt to infringe on their Second Amendment right.

Signs have been popping up across the state, town halls have been packed, and the company leading the charge against the magazine ban, Magpul Industries, has seen a nearly 1900% growth in its Facebook fans from around 10,000 to 185,000 as of this post.

The response from Democrats, and gun control activists, has been nearly uniform in pointing out polling that shows that the broader public supports taking away guns and limiting magazines. Regardless of the veracity of that polling, it simply doesn’t much matter because most voters don’t consider guns an issue that moves their support.

As Bill Clinton pointed out, gun rights supporters do. Per Politico:

Clinton recalled Al Gore’s 2000 campaign against George W. Bush in Colorado, where a referendum designed to close the so-called gun show loophole shared the ballot with the presidential ticket. Gore publicly backed the proposal, while Bush opposed it.

Though the referendum passed with 70 percent of the vote, Gore lost the state. Clinton said that the reason was because a good chunk of the referendum’s opponents were single-issue voters who automatically rejected Gore as anti-gun.

And Clinton said that passing the 1994 federal assault weapons ban “devastated” more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers in the 1994 midterms — and cost then-Speaker of the House Tom Foley (D-Wash.) his job and his seat in Congress.

Some legislative Democrats, like Senator Tochtrop (D-Thornton), understand this. She warned her fellow Democrats to vote their district and “be moderate” on gun control issues.

As some of the most controversial legislation reaches the Senate the question now becomes which Senate Democrats — like Angela Giron (D-Pueblo) — will heed Clinton and Tochtrop’s warnings.

Do they listen to their party’s leadership who assures them the public supports their gun grab, or do they pay attention to the grassroots wave sweeping across Colorado that speaks to the massive political boondoggle they could be wrapping themselves up in?