NSSF Cautiously Pleased With How New Mexico Legislative Session Ended

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has no fear at all in overstepping her authority in the name of gun control. We know good and well that she has no problem with that because, well, she’s done it. We all remember her unilaterally trying to ban the lawful carry of firearms completely in Albuquerque.

It was so bad that even anti-gun allies took issue with it. It probably wasn’t out of some supposed deference for the Second Amendment and more because it tipped their hands, but they still took issue with it.

And she desperately wanted some gun control passed in this last legislative session.

She didn’t get it.

In fact, it’s enough to make the NSSF feel relieved, though their relief is a bit tempered considering Grisham’s history.

Not unexpected, Gov. Lujan Grisham made it clear that she wasn’t satisfied with the inaction of the legislature and she vowed to plow ahead on her own, invoking her power to call a special legislative session for “related and germane” pet issues. After all, this is the governor who two years ago infamously declared, “If there’s an emergency … I can invoke additional powers. No constitutional right, in my view … is intended to be absolute.”

This time, after Saturday’s regular order deadline came and passed effectively stalling out the gun control bills, the governor’s tone sounded eerily similar.

“While we made progress on universal free school lunch, literacy, water planning, and firefighting resources, I cannot ignore that we failed to adequately address the public safety crisis facing our state,” the governor said in a statement. “With 270 public safety bills introduced this session and only a handful passed, we have not met our responsibility to New Mexicans.”

The governor’s special session tease came on the heels of a gang-related criminal shooting that happened Friday night at “an unsanctioned car show.” Las Cruces police have already arrested one adult and three teenagers and charged them with crimes involved in the shooting. The three teens are already barred from legally owning firearms so no existing or additional laws would change that.

This piece also goes on to quote a couple of folks to address some of this stuff, particularly regarding Las Cruces. One of which is probably the most brilliant Second Amendment writer in the country, and incredibly good-looking, too!

The other is a pretty good guy and an editor at some site or another.

Cam Edwards at Bearing Arms connected the straight line from dots commonly used by gun control activists when criminal shootings occur inevitably leading to calls for more gun control laws that are ignored by criminals and only penalize the law-abiding.

“While Grisham and gun control activists are already pointing to the incident as evidence that an ‘assault weapon’ ban is needed, Las Cruces Police Chief Jeremy Story told reporters on Saturday that all of the more than 50 shell casings that were found at the scene came from handguns.”

Tom Knighton, writing in Townhall, added on a prescient point as well. “How anyone thinks an incident of two people getting guns illegally is a failure of too few gun control laws is beyond me. Instead, what we see here is a specific location where crime was becoming more and more of a problem and that local police say they were too short-staffed to actually do anything about,” Knighton wrote.

Hey, I know those guys.

Yes, we both talked about this within the Townhall family of sites, and we both had valid points. Well, I obviously think I do, but Cam does as well.

Grisham’s desire to use Las Cruces to leverage gun control, when both of these suspects are too young to have lawfully bought the handguns used in this crime in the first place, is nothing more than her most recent attempt to cram gun control down the throats of the people of New Mexico.

Republicans have demanded the session include the opportunity to talk about mental health and criminal justice reform, which it should, since those two areas might have some real relevance to what happened in Young Park that night.

This was a complete and total failure of every system already in place in New Mexico. That means it’s not remotely justifiable to use this as a prompt for more gun control that would also do nothing to prevent a repeat of his event.

But Grisham doesn’t actually care about what happened.

For her, the bodies of those three dead people are a soapbox she can use to try and push for measures that will infringe on the rights of people who had nothing at all to do with what happened, while doing nothing to stop the next such incident.

She doesn’t care. 

So I get the caution from the NSSF. It’s entirely justified.