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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