From The Gazette (Colorado Springs):

DENVER – It might have seemed like a small thing this month when The Gazette corrected private gun sale background check numbers from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, but as is often the case in journalism, there’s a story behind the story.

Questions arose in early February about the accuracy of numbers released by the CBI showing that since a law went into effect in July requiring background checks on private gun sales more than 6,000 of those private checks had been conducted.

The CBI refused to answer those questions directly.

Without Colorado’s Open Records Act (CORA) – a portion of state statute that guarantees public access to almost all government documents – the whole truth behind those statistics would not have been revealed.

Monday is the start of Sunshine Week, a celebration of laws across the nation that open records and meetings to the public, laws that let the sun shine on the shadowy parts of government.

Although Colorado has had an open records act since 1969, the battle for transparency continues and is heating up.

Read the rest of the story at Gazette.com.