Freedom-backers on the internet justifiably showed outrage last Thursday when news surfaced that New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) issued a so-called “Emergency Executive Order” supposedly banning people in Albuquerque from carrying concealed firearms for the next 30 days.
The fantastical and threatening “E.O.” purportedly went into “effect” the next day, and Grisham’s arrogant, self-defeating, immoral statements backing it up not only got people commenting on her idiocy, they also inspired some to call for her impeachment.
At her press conference, Governor Grisham claimed that her incredible transgression of fundamental human rights was justified as a response to the shooting deaths of a 13-year-old girl on July 28, a five-year-old girl on August 14, and an 11-year-old boy on September 6.
And then she took questions from people in the room, and made things worse.
Answering one questioner who asked about why she doesn’t call for better law enforcement in the city, she said:
“The value of the order is, is that it gives me three things. One: it says it’s a state-wide issue and it’s a message to everyone to start leveraging their resources and arresting people.”
Which might inspire a few of us puny humans out here to wonder what she means by claiming that deaths in Albuquerque are a “state-wide issue” and how that ties in with the ideas of separate cities and city-based police. It also might make one quizzical as to what she means by “start leveraging their resources.”
What has Albuquerque been doing with the resources it already “leveraged” away from taxpayers? One gets the impression that Grisham believes an infinite wellspring of taxes (aka “resources”) are at the beck and call of local government, and that more money simply can be “leveraged.” It’s as if, to her, the taxpayers are temporary holders of what actually and rightfully is the property of politicians and bureaucrats.
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Then, she hits her second “bullet point.”
“Two. The jurisdictions can come at this – including with the DOJ – differently, without the leveraging and the additional resources, and where do they go? We gotta make sure that every ONE is bumping-up their services. It’s a message to the, uh, Metropolitan Detention Centers. It’s a message to the HMOs – you’d better figure out treatment…”
All of which is just a jumble of nonsense piled on government assumptions. She seems to claim that her edict on Albuquerque is a signal to other cities to increase their focus of resources onto violent crime prevention and prosecution. But her E.O. will see state resources applied to the enforcement in Alburquerque, so her “I’m carrying a big stick” blather means nothing. Her belief that cities can just “bump-up their services,” is pretty darned arrogant, as well, and her “message to the HMOs” is pure fascism of the kind the Mussolini would have admired.
A moment later she says to the reporter:
“I can’t arrest everyone. There are literally too many people to arrest!”
In other words, Grisham wants to make local policing a state matter, and, to make it worse, she wants to focus that “policing” on concealed carry guns, evidently assuming such state-down activity will put a damper on violent crime AND on the possession of guns. And then, to cap it off, she undercuts her own practical argument for a so-called “ban” on concealed firearms by admitting she “can’t arrest everybody.”
This is absurd, and, in fact, her statement reiterates the key point that armed, peacefully-minded people make by buying guns for their own self-protection.
As I have noted for MRCTV, armed civilians stop more crimes than police do, every year. It’s just a matter of physics and numbers. Police cannot be everywhere, and usually arrive after a REAL first-responder – an on-hand civilian – takes action.
And, of course, anyone who has looked at the tragic “Prohibition Era” can observe that prohibition does not work when something is in demand. It merely eliminates above-board, honest, ways to resolve disputes, increasing the value of handling threats via violence, rather than courts and civil proceedings.
If Grisham had devoted a moment to logic to the matter of prohibition, rather than adopting her “all-powerful” mindset, she might realize that the higher the incentive to be armed (say, because one works in a black market or already engages in some other criminal activity) the higher the probability that one will NOT give up arms. The average “law-abiding” civilians out there might see the cops as bigger forces/threats to them and their families in the face of this governor's move, and they would be more likely to disarm or not acquire arms. But the criminally-minded won’t disarm, and now can operate with the awareness that there will be FEWER armed targets out there, meaning that this threat by the governor not only is immoral and flagrantly unconstitutional, it will put peacefully-minded people at greater risk from criminals who will not give up their arms.
And that is just the practical logic that shreds this woman’s insane edict.
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution also is clear that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed by any level of government.
Why politicians of Grisham’s ilk continually skip that legal reality is baffling, but they don’t seem at all inclined to change their dishonest ways of swearing oaths to the US Constitution and then utterly disregarding said oaths.
In fact, during her press conference appearance, Grisham claims that her duty to uphold her oath to the Constitution is "not absolute." So, why swear an oath? Why have a written Constitution in the first place? Why did the Founders offer an amendment process should politicians or civilians think a new power needed to be attached to the leviathan?
Finally, there is the less visible aspect to her flagrantly anti-rights, anti-logic, anti-Constitution declaration: that is the fact that Grisham predicated her “Executive Order” on gun-related violence being a “health emergency.”
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Not only is gun-related violence not anything of the sort, even if it were a “health emergency” there is nothing in the founding-era US political philosophy that embraces the idea of government handling a “health emergency.” And, even if there were, she cannot “suspend the Constitution” by declaring an “Emergency” of her liking or any kind of “emergency.” The Constitution doesn’t carry fine print allowing that.
Grisham’s move has focused so much justified opprobrium that Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie (R) Tweeted:
“The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in our Constitution precisely because this Governor thinks all of your rights are subservient to her lust for control. There is no obligation to comply with her illegal orders.”
Well said. In fact, Grisham is threatening people with gun violence, sending armed agents of the state to hunt down peaceful people. It doesn’t take long to see that her threats are, as John Locke put it, creating a “state of war” against those innocent people.
Critics are justified to be outraged.