The New Mexico Governor’s ‘Suspension’ of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is Both Illegal and Stupid

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Saturday, September 09, 2023

 

The governor of New Mexico has decided to “suspend” the right to bear arms for 30 days:

 

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said she will enact a temporary ban on carrying firearms in any public space across Bernalillo County. The governor made the announcement during a news conference Friday.

 

Sitting alongside the Albuquerque Police Chief and Bernalillo County Sheriff. The governor says part of this new order is a 30-day suspension on open and concealed carry on public property for anyone other than law enforcement or licensed security. “I’ve warned everyone that we expect a direct challenge, probably as you’re writing this we’re getting a challenge, and that’s the way it should work. But I have to take a tough direct stand, or basically I’m just ignoring the fact that we lost an 11-year-old, another child,” said Gov. Lujan Grisham.

 

This is not how the law works in America. As far as I can see, there’s nothing in any New Mexico statute that gives the governor the power to declare an emergency suspending the right to carry, and there’s certainly nothing in the U.S. Constitution that does. If our elected officials were allowed to shelve our unalienable rights every time they believed that those rights were being abused by outlaws, then they wouldn’t be unalienable rights; they’d be privileges. Lujan Grisham knows this — which is why she has said not only that she has “warned everyone that we expect a direct challenge,” but that the arrival of such a challenge is “the way it should work.” Those are the words of a person who knows she is breaking the law but has resolved to do it anyway. “I have to take a tough direct stand,” she insists, giving the game away. Actually, she does not. She has to uphold her oath of office.

 

Just as bad is that Lujan Grisham does not even believe she’s doing anything useful:

 

The governor says she doesn’t expect criminals to follow the order. But she hopes it is “a resounding message,” to everyone else in the community to report gun crime. “The point here is, is that, if everyone did it, and I wasn’t legally challenged, you would have fewer risks on the street, and I could safely say, to every New Mexican, particularly those folks living in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County, I believe that you’re safer for the next 30 days, we have to wait and see,” said Lujan Grisham.

 

This is absolute nonsense. Lujan Grisham doesn’t expect criminals to follow her illegal order, but she hopes that it will send a “resounding message”? to the people who aren’t criminals, and that this, in turn, will create “fewer risks on the street”? What? That — that right there — is the practical problem with almost every gun-control measure that is ever proposed in the United States. It’s almost elegant in its futility. As data from Florida and Texas has shown, carriers are between six and seven times more law-abiding than the police. Those people don’t need to be sent a “message,” because they aren’t the problem in the first place. The problem — the only problem — is the criminals, the very people whom Lujan Grisham acknowledges will be unaffected by her order. What a mountain of tyrannical stupidity she has built. I expect it to be short-lived.