On Guns, Santa Fe Gun Owners Need to Be Heard

Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber put a column into the Sunday New Mexican in light of the Santa Fe TX school shooting lamenting the lack of state gun control efforts. Mr Mayor stated that if the city can't regulate guns due to the NM Constitution's preemption clause, it will try to regulate magazines, ammo, and potentially take other actions if the city's lawyers think they can get away with regulating firearm use short of regulating guns. I think any attempt to circumvent the state constitution will further polarize the gun violence debate, and should be avoided.

Note this tactic was explored by the city once before, in 2013, and fortunately died a quick death as it most likely violates the state constitution's preemption clause. We are once again caught between the liberal version of regulating guns in general, especially trying to eliminate those guns that liberals find offensive, and trying to keep guns out of the wrong hands, whichever hands happen to be turning rogue.

I find it interesting that Mayor Webber put the usual Progressive language about ridding the community of assault weapons and big magazines into the context of the Santa Fe, TX shooting. That shooting was done with a garden variety shotgun and revolver, i.e., that shooting, unlike some others, had nothing to do with high capacity magazines or "black rifles". Black rifles are not necessarily the problem. Any gun in the wrong hands is the problem. But that's somewhat beside the point of the city ignoring the state constitution.

Article II, § 6 of the Constitution of New Mexico provides:

No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes, but nothing herein shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons. No municipality or county shall regulate, in any way, an incident of the right to keep and bear arms.

 Italics mine. Now one can suggest that ammo, or a magazine, is not a gun, but a gun without ammo or a magazine is not much more than a blued steel paperweight. Ammo, magazines, etc, are "incident" of the right to keep and bear arms since they are part of the overall package. But of course I am no lawyer.

 Having recently moved to the City Different, I would resent becoming a criminal merely by having signed a change of address form. I would likewise hate to have to sign on to an injunction to prevent an ordinance from taking effect and see my own tax dollars drained down a black hole fighting a constitutionally problematic ordinance in court rather than seeing our tax dollars directed at preventing a shooting. Hopefully, the city attorneys will not go down this rabbit hole. If the gun violence prevention folks want to get rid of preemption, it is by amending the state constitution, which from my read, is absurdly easy. One might think of that if the other side of the political fence tries the same game some day on some other hot button issue such as abortion.

The Mayor blamed the NRA for that preemption clause. While the NRA may have "swept into the state" in 1986 in support of said clause, it was added to the constitution not by the NRA, which is not a registered voter, but by the voters of New Mexico. The whole state of New Mexico is not a Progressive paradise: it is a mix of urban, rural, conservative, moderate, and liberal people. Animal rights activists and pig hunters. Vegans and venison connoisseurs. Gun haters and black rifle tinkerers. Plus, its not just the NRA that sweeps in to mess with our gun laws.  When Everytown for Gun Safety "swept into the state" in 2016 carrying a pre-written background check bill and a large wad of cash to pass around to key legislators and liberal black money organizations, their bill failed because it was ridiculously overbroad and was rejected by the Legislature. I worked on it, trying to help Stephanie Garcia-Richards cobble together a bill that had more support, but since I was not a lobbyist with a checkbook, my opinion did not much matter, although a moderated bill emerged a little too late to move forward. In fact, the NRA was out-spent and outnumbered by Mr. Bloomberg's lobbyists on that one. The one NRA lobbyist who was in the state thought my efforts were, to put it charitably, lost in the maelstrom.

Sometimes, although not necessarily in a deep red or deep blue location, consensus matters. So rather than treating gun owners like the enemy and playing fast and loose with the constitution, perhaps the City Different should find points of agreement with the firearms community. I don't think anyone here, and that includes gun owners, wants to see our schools shot up . Laws directed at actual problems, such as CAP laws to keep Junior out of the family arsenal unless supervised, tax breaks on gun safes, background checks for private sales to anyone you don't know well, well written ERPO laws, violence intervention, holding parents accountable for their kids (such as knowing if your kids are planning a mass shooting or piling up arms and explosives), engaged parenting so that kids don't go down the rabbit hole of toxic social media while having access to firearms, free gun safety training, and other efforts that don't violate the Constitution, many of which require state bills, aren't even being discussed by the City.

Yes, Mr. Mayor, if this proceeds as you have written, some of us will most likely not get out of the way. For better or worse, gun ownership (as in that "guns and bibles" quote) is part of the American fabric. I still hope there is a way to deal with gun misuse without resort to more political gasoline and matches from either side.  I would prefer both sides find common ground, which seems to be the opposite of what the nation is experiencing. Maybe we can be the "city different" with regards to gun violence prevention and find some of that elusive common ground. Maybe.

New York Magazine: No "epidemic" of school shootings.
Northeastern Univ.: School shootings, 1990's-present.

Maybe its not a drought

Editor, New Mexican

Stolen from the Albuquerque Journal article
 linked in the text

 Both the Santa Fe and Albuquerque newspapers have recently run stories about how New Mexico is in severe, persistent drought. To be sure, "severe drought" has plagued the state in 2011-12, 2013, and presently. Maybe there is a pattern here we want to avoid discussing.

Many if not most of the climate models for the 21st century suggest that climate change, in part driven by human industrial emissions, will result in progressive drying in the American Southwest. The reasons for drying include an expansion of the subtropical high, warming that increases evaporation and transpiration, and reduced snowpack. All of these will impact ground and surface water in New Mexico and put increasing stresses on natural systems and human agricultural and urban resources.

Drying in the Southwest is nothing new. Decade to century long drying has occurred several times in the last couple millennia, most pronounced during the Roman and Medieval periods. During the twentieth century, Elephant Butte Lake levels have oscillated between poverty and plenty in concert with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Anthropogenic climate forcing due to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is an overprint onto natural variability; it intensifies the chances of increased warming and drying on a century to millennial time frame.

The bottom line is that individuals, governments, and newspapers have to stop behaving as though we are in a transient drought with a return to "normal" and realize that more likely, we are going into another prolonged drying. How well we manage drying will depend on policy decisions we make if we wish to be proactive rather than suffer the consequences of whistling past the graveyard.

Closed Course, Don't Try This At Home?

NPR ran a story a few minutes ago titled "Sandy Hook Families Push To Hold Gun Maker Accountable In Connecticut Court". The question to a state judge will be whether parents of the Newtown school kids shot up and killed by Adam Lanza can sue Remington, which made and marketed the Bushmaster rifle that Lanza used to assault the school, in spite of Remington not having any control over Mr. Lanza acquiring the rifle and in spite of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protects gun manufacturers from being sued due to the intentional misuse of an otherwise properly functioning product.

 The story on NPR indicated that the lawyers will go after Remington not because the gun is dangerous.  After all, all guns are dangerous. But instead, the lawsuit will suggest Remington marketed its product in a manner that raised the chances that these rifles would be used inappropriately, i.e., "negligent entrustment" with ads like the one on the left and some shown in this NY Magazine article. Never mind that millions are out there among innocuous collectors and gun nuts and only a very few are used inappropriately, even when marketing guns with stupid ads such as the Man Card ad shown here.

If we held car companies to such standards, would cars be sold at all or would many of the car ads fail the lawsuit test? Not only are cars used inappropriately, but some car advertisements go at least as far as Remington in marketing them as something we should be using to get our aggression or sex appeal sated. See, for example these two below. I got into a shitfest with Bicycling Magazine a few years ago when BikeMag published ads advertising cars as ways to exercise one's aggression on the road. All the while, bicyclists were being subject to road rage. Bicycling told me its ad department and editorial department were on separate pages.Yeah, right.



Or this one.



 I'm not sure guns are sold any more stupidly than cars and if we expect car buyers to be able to separate dumb ads from real life, I wonder whether we are holding Remington and Benz buyers to the same standard since gun buyers should be able to do the same.

Closed course. Don't try this at home as you will be held to real life standards. You think?