Key Albuquerque officials won’t enforce the New Mexico governor’s recent order.
At a press conference last Friday, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham had vowed to suspend the right to publicly carry firearms “in any public space” in the Albuquerque area. The temporary order, declared in response to recent shootings, was justified by the governor as an “emergency health measure.”
The response has been far from uniformly positive. In addition to officials balking, a gun-rights group, National Association for Gun Rights, is suing to block the order. And there has been talk of impeaching the governor. There was even an armed protest.
The governor is either unaware or heedless of the possibility that bad people with guns can be stopped by good people with guns — a lesson that would-be robbers belatedly learned in Maryland a couple weeks ago when they failed to rob a pub full of police officers. (They had missed the cop-bar scene in Code of Silence.) Violent criminals in the area, for their part, have somehow not agreed to defer their activities for a month in deference to her wishful thinking, however.
Officials who say they won’t cooperate with the governor’s aggressive power grab include Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, Police Chief Harold Medina, and Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman.
Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen says he is wary of the risks “posed by prohibiting law-abiding citizens from their constitutional right to self-defense.”
District Attorney Bregman says, “As an officer of the court, I cannot and will not enforce something that is clearly unconstitutional.”
Thus raising a standard to which people in positions of authority should repair much more often than they do.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “Balking at the Ban”
Two thoughts come to mind.
The unhappy thought, which I have previously expressed, is that our system of government lacks a mechanism properly to punish state officials who violate constitutionally guaranteed rights. Rightly, this governor should not merely be impeached but imprisoned or perhaps simply stripped of all protection by law.
The happier thought is that she has tipped the collective hand of the corporatist left, showing cards that were not meant to be shown so soon. Eventually, they would use an appeal to something called “public health” to take-away every liberty not stolen under some excuse (eg, “climate emergency”). But she’s attempting to use this excuse before people have been made sufficiently docile to accept it.
Republicans have been arguing that the problem is not guns but rather Mental Health. The epidemic of killings with guns is a health issue. They are correct. Where we disagree is on how to handle access to highly lethal weapons by people who are mentally ill? Why is it that other countries which do not have less mental illness per capita have far fewer killings with guns? It seems like the answer is access to highly lethal weapons by people who are mentally ill in an environment where we are drowning in highly lethal weapons. What do we have like 20,000 guns per capita in the United States? I’m exaggerating. A mentally ill person can’t walk down the street without stumbling over a highly Lethal Weapon with a sticker on it that says, kill kill kill. Again I exaggerate.
You ask “Why is it that other countries which do not have less mental illness per capita have far fewer killings with guns?”, which question is already broken. You’ve tacked-on “with guns” as if the objective is not to reduce homicides, but homicides with guns. The vast majority of homicides with guns in America are suicides; remove guns from that equation, and people will use a different method. About a hundred years ago, a mercury-based commercial product was outlawed exactly because it was a popular poison amongst suicides; the suicide rate didn’t go down, because people turned to other methods.
Moreover, even if we could reduce murder and manslaughter by making firearms more difficult to obtain, a cost would come in the form of an increase in other crimes. Excepting murder and manslaughter, the rates per capita of all violent crimes are higher in the UK than in America. How many more rapes should we trade for a reduction in murders and in manslaughters?
Pleased to see that some public officers understand their pledged fealty to the Constitution presently in effect as opposed to a modified version they might prefer.
Hooray, and I hope this is the commencement of a few trends, not just the refusal of public servants to follow clearly unconstitutional orders but as the impeachment and removal for office of any “public servants” who knowingly violate their oaths of office.
Just another commie in power.
Constittution? What’s that?