I’m not sure what other explanation there is for this remarkable statement in today’s Durango Herald.  Commenting on his eventual vote for HB-1224, the magazine limit that would essentially ban all magazines, McLachlan had this to say to his constituents:

Fields originally wanted the limit set at 10 bullets, but McLachlan successfully amended it in February to raise the limit to 15. He later said he wanted to see a 30-round limit.

McLachlan voted again Wednesday for the 15-round limit and told the Herald he decided to support the bill after no Republicans stepped forward to help him raise the limit to 30.

He asked gun lobbyists to get Senate Republicans to try to raise the limit, but they were more interested in killing the bill than improving it, he said.

“The reason we’ve ended up where we are today is, in part, their fault because they never tried to put a 30-round limit forward,” McLachlan said.

Not so fast.  HB-1224 was assigned to the House Judiciary Committee, on which McLachlan sits.  The record shows that he introduced Amendment L006, which raised the limit from 10 to 15 rounds, as he says.  But there was a proposed amendment to the amendment, which would have raised it from 15 rounds to 31 rounds.  That amendment to L006 failed on a 7-4 strict party-line vote, with McLachlan voting against.  Eventually, L006 did pass, raising the limit to 15 rounds.

If McLachlan wanted a 30-round limit, that was his chance, and he turned it down.  It was also ample evidence that a 30-round limit had little-to-no support among Democrats.  He could only hope to blame Senate Republicans, in the expectation that his constituents would be unaware that he had voted to kill just such an amendment, if he believed that his constituents weren’t listening online to the debate, or couldn’t look up his votes in committee.

McLachlan is facing a potential recall over this vote.  He only won election in a fairly Republican district by 900 votes in a strong Democratic year here in Colorado.  And it’s far from clear that repeating the defensive, condescending tactics of so many Obamacare-burdened Democrats in 2010 will serve him any better than it did them.