New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public in and around Albuquerque will spur a legal fight but might also raise public awareness about gun violence, legal scholars and advocates said.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public in and around Albuquerque will spur a legal fight but might also raise public awareness about gun violence, legal scholars and advocates said.
“It’s going to be challenged. But she’s trying to move the debate,” Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount’s Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said after Lujan Grisham announced Friday that she was temporarily suspending the right to carry firearms in her state’s largest city and surrounding Bernalillo County.
The 30-day suspension, enacted as an emergency public health measure, applies in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks.
“No person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed security officer, shall possess a firearm … either openly or concealed,” the governor’s order states.
“Politically, a lot of people will react favorably,” Levinson predicted during a telephone interview late Friday with The Associated Press. “But she’s bumping up against the Second Amendment, no doubt about it. And we have a very conservative Supreme Court that is poised to expand Second Amendment rights.”
Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, applauded the governor’s order.
“If it makes it so that people think twice about using a gun to solve a personal dispute, it makes them think twice that they don’t want to go to jail,” Viscoli said, “then it will work.”
The top Republican in the New Mexico Senate, Greg Baca of Belen, denounced Lujan Grisham’s order as an infringement on the gun rights of law-abiding citizens. Dan Lewis, who serves on the nonpartisan Albuquerque City Council, called the order an unconstitutional edict.
