He printed and distributed them to local gun clubs to make people aware of an upcoming town-hall meeting for Giron. Head got dozens of people there, but he felt Giron short-circuited the discussion. At the next town hall, he again handed out fliers to build a crowd, but this time Giron ruled that the discussion was to be exclusively about mortgages.

Head still got Giron to agree to hold one more town hall before the vote on guns, and this time roughly 1,000 people showed up. If Giron didn’t realize then that she had a populist revolt on her hands, she needed to be in a different line of work — and now she is.

What so got under Head’s skin, the sense that his representative wasn’t listening to him, added fuel to the recalls more broadly. Morse turned away people who wanted to testify on the measures in the senate. It was a notable act of highhandedness in a body that, as Dave Kopel of the Colorado-based Independence Institute points out, usually has limitless patience for citizen input.