As states across the country move to curtail gun ownership in attempts to prevent mass shootings, women in Colorado are asking their governor to do something both highly unusual and clearly illegal: ban all firearms with the stroke of a pen. 

About 2,000 people participated in a sit-in at the Colorado capitol building at Denver on Monday, asking the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, to issue a unilateral gun ban. The vast majority of Monday’s protesters were white and female. 

Mr. Polis — a gay millionaire who wants to eliminate the state income tax and protect the Second Amendment — has said he “will not issue an unconstitutional order that will be struck down in court simply to make a public relations statement.”

The protest was organized by a new group called Here 4 the Kids, which was founded following the Covenant School shooting at Nashville earlier this year. The group’s co-founder, Tina Strawn, told ABC News that it is the responsibility of white women specifically to show up because Black people have done the heavy lifting at these kinds of protests for years. 

“So, it’s time for white women to show up. It’s time for white women to put their bodies, their privilege, and their power on the line to save our kids,” Ms. Strawn said. “And it is something that they are recognizing that they need to be doing. That’s why they’re showing up.”

The sit-in at the state capitol received support from many prominent white, female celebrities, including actresses Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Amy Schumer, and Michaela Watkins.

“White women, statistically, have been the least likely to be arrested, assaulted by police officers,” Ms. Watkins, a “Saturday Night Live” alumna, told CNN on Monday. “If marginalized communities have been just traumatized over and over and over again I guess we just come together.”

Here 4 Kids’s other co-founder, Saira Rao, said Colorado has “lost our imagination to dream bigger and envision a life where our kids are safe wherever they go. This is not a way to live. It is not a way to live. Bulletproof backpacks [are] not normal, and we’ve gotten used to this as if it’s normal.”

When asked if Mr. Polis would ultimately sign the unilateral gun ban, Ms. Rao sounded optimistic. “We have to believe that any decent human being with the power to end children’s pain and suffering will absolutely choose their right to live over the right to bear arms,” she said. “We believe [Mr. Polis] will do it because what decent human being wouldn’t do it?”

Ms. Rao has specifically called on white women to put their own skin in the game to advance racial justice, arguing that white women will be less likely to be arrested or assaulted by law enforcement. She founded Here 4 Kids after leading another organization aimed at white women in recent years. 

Ms. Rao’s previous organization, Race2Dinner, was founded in 2019. According to the group, it would host “radically honest conversations” about “white supremacy culture … on the dismantling of whiteness and white supremacy.” Ms. Rao and her business partner, Regina Jackson, would charge $2,500 to sit with groups of white women and have these conversations for just a few hours. 

Despite resisting calls to ban guns unilaterally, Mr. Polis has embraced what he terms constructive measures. Just this year, in the wake of the Covenant School shooting at Nashville, Mr. Polis worked with the state legislature to raise the minimum purchase age for weapons, expanded the state’s red flag law, and imposed a three-day waiting period for gun purchases. 

In a new front for gun control advocates, Mr. Polis also signed into law a bill that would circumvent federal statutes and allow individuals to sue gun manufacturers with greater ease. Federal law affords wide protections to firearms manufacturers so that they cannot face most civil suits in court when victims of gun violence sue for damages. 

One state senator, Sonya Jaquez Lewis, said the goal of her bill was to protect plaintiffs “if they want to go to civil court. It evens the playing field so that industry, those businesses, will just be put on the same playing field as every other business.”