We should rightly call what happened in New Mexico yesterday outrageous, but things like this are happening so often these days that some of us may have started to become numb to it. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an executive order suspending the right of citizens to carry firearms across the City of Albuquerque and the surrounding county for thirty days. She claimed the ability to do this by declaring a state of emergency in the area and seizing emergency powers under that premise. The “emergency” in question was a spate of shootings in the city in recent weeks. The Governor plans to have the state police enforce the order, likely because the city’s Chief of Police has already refused to enforce it and the County Sheriff immediately said he was “uneasy” about the order. (Associated Press)

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.

The Democratic governor said she expects legal challenges but was compelled to act because of recent shootings, including the death of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week.

Lujan Grisham said state police would be responsible for enforcing what amount to civil violations. Albuquerque police Chief Harold Medina said he won’t enforce it, and Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said he’s uneasy about it because it raises too many questions about constitutional rights.

The first question crossing your mind is probably, ‘Wait… can she do that?’ The answer would be “no,” at least in a sane world where the Constitution was still respected. This would be a dodgy move (to say the least) even if she somehow convinced the state legislature, the Mayor of Albuquerque, and the City Council to all go along with it. But she didn’t. She just pulled the same tool out of her bag of tricks that became common during the pandemic. She declared a “state of emergency” and began issuing edicts like any totalitarian government, Constitution be damned.

Here’s another important aspect of Lujan Grisham’s “rationale” for her ability to do this, as pointed out by Mike LaChance and John Hasson. You can watch the clip below.

Note her choice of words. "not absolute"
Joe Biden has used those exact same words about constitutional rights. https://t.co/4URg63aBPF

— Mike LaChance (@MikeLaChance33) September 9, 2023

Her duty to uphold her oath to defend the Constitution is “not absolute.” It’s true that Joe Biden has used very similar language in the past. This is becoming alarmingly common in Washington, particularly among Democrats, though it’s not exclusive to them. If you don’t like part of the Constitution and the public will to amend the document does not exist, you just ignore it. The right to free speech is embedded in the First Amendment, but how often are we seeing free speech trampled when such speech is inconvenient or conflicts with The Narrative? Freedom of the press has similarly been erased when journalists of any stripe begin reporting on subjects that the DC permanent power structure doesn’t want people talking about.

Having a significant number of shootings in a particular area is a tragedy, of course. But it is not an Act of God or anything else that would qualify as a state of emergency. If you have a lot of people shooting other people, what you have is too much crime and not enough of a law enforcement response to tamp down the wrongdoers. The correct response is not to cancel the Constitutional rights of the law-abiding, but to lock up the lawbreakers and send a message to others.

We should also take this opportunity to remind the Governor of the same obvious reality that emerges whenever Democrats plunge overboard in their efforts to restrict gun rights. Criminals who are willing to shoot other human beings are not going to be deterred because someone in the state government issued an executive order. That’s particularly true when the order in question only treats those defying the order as having committed a civil violation. ‘Oh, man. I was going to pop a cap in that jerk, but I wouldn’t want to wind up having to pay a small fine.’

If Michelle Lujan Grisham was just hoping to generate some quick headlines for herself and score points with the far left, she has certainly succeeded. But they are all of the wrong sort of headlines and this order should be running into a brick wall in the courts in short order.