Michelle Lujan Grisham finds few friends with New Mexico’s radical gun ban

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Lujan Grisham issued the ban last Friday, calling it a public health emergency following a series of fatal shootings involving children, including an 11-year-old boy who was killed outside a minor-league baseball stadium; a 5-year-old girl who died after being struck by a bullet while lying in bed in an Albuquerque trailer park; and a 13-year-old girl who was fatally shot in the small town of Questa, about three hours away from Albuquerque. 

The governor, whose grandfather was the New Mexico Supreme Court’s first Latino chief justice and her uncle, Manual Lujan, who was former President George H.W. Bush’s Interior secretary, said she was forced to take a “tough, direct stand or else basically I’m just ignoring the fact that we lost an 11-year-old.”

Lujan Grisham called the shootings part of an epidemic and said the 30-day pause on carrying firearms, which was immediately met by a slew of lawsuits as well as a push for her impeachment, would be a good “cooling-off period” as state leaders figured out a way to address the spike in gun-related violence.

Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city, has logged 76 homicides this year alone, and its aggravated crime rates are up 8% from 2022. In 2021, the state had the unfortunate distinction of being among the top three in the country with the highest gun mortality rates. And while New Mexico is an “open carry” state, which allows residents to openly carry loaded firearms without a license, Lujan Grisham said the “time for standard measures has passed.”

“When New Mexicans are afraid to be in crowds, to take their kids to school, to leave a baseball game — when their very right to exist is threatened by the prospect of violence at every turn — something is very wrong,” she added.

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Late Thursday, she called out Republicans in a prickly X post, but didn’t acknowledge that members of her own party have also strongly denounced her decision.

“I’m still waiting on a thank-you note from @NewMexicoGOP,” she posted. “Way to use my call to action around #gunviolence as a fundraiser instead of using it as an opportunity for immediate action to save New Mexican lives.”

Lujan Grisham was first elected governor of the Southwestern state in 2018 after defeating Republican challenger former U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce. She was reelected in 2022 and ran on a platform that included promoting public safety.

According to her campaign website, that meant keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and keeping violent offenders off the street. As governor, she signed off on bipartisan crime legislation that would increase the sentence for gun crimes, coming down extra hard on felons. She’s also pushed for universal background checks and signed legislation that allowed the courts to take guns away from people who are at risk to themselves or others.

While those actions seemed progressive in New Mexico, her emergency order last week was a step too far from some supporters who had been in her corner, including the state Democratic Attorney General Raul Torrez.

In a letter, he told Lujan Grisham that while he recognized his “statutory obligation as New Mexico’s chief legal officer to defend state officials when they are sued in their official capacity,” he could not stand by her emergency declaration.

“Simply put, I do not believe that the Emergency Order will have any meaningful impact on public safety but, more importantly, I do not believe it passes constitutional muster,” he added. 

U.S. District Court Judge David Urias, a Biden appointee who took his seat on the bench last year, temporarily blocked Lujan Grisham’s ban on Wednesday, claiming it went against numerous U.S. Supreme Court precedents on the Second Amendment ruling that people had the right to self-defense and to carry a gun outside their homes. The ban is also at the center of multiple lawsuits, including one from the National Association for Gun Rights that claimed it was “presumptively unconstitutional” and “infringes the rights of the people … to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment.” 

“To be honest with you, I think you have kind of a hard road here to get up,” Urias told Holly Agajanian, the attorney for the governor’s office.

Even before the ruling, Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen, who oversees the county that includes Albuquerque, said he would not enforce the governor’s order, joining the county’s top prosecutor, the Albuquerque mayor, and the city’s police chief who also said no.

“It’s unconstitutional, so there’s no way we can enforce that order,” Allen said. “This ban does nothing to curb gun violence.”

Two Republican state lawmakers, Reps. Stefani Lord and John Block, have even called for Lujan Grisham’s impeachment, while Democratic state Sen. Joe Cervantes implored the governor to rescind her order, stating that it was an “unconstitutional approach” that “undermines the important collaboration gun issues deserve, and the important role of a governor to lead genuine reforms.”

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) also took the governor to task on X.

“I support gun safety laws,” he wrote in a post that has gotten 7.4 million views. “However, this order from the governor of New Mexico violates the U.S. Constitution. No state in the union can suspend the federal Constitution. There is no such thing as a state public health emergency exception to the U.S. Constitution.”

Gun control activist and Stoneman Douglas High School massacre survivor David Hogg said that while he supports “gun safety,” there is “no such thing as a state public health emergency exception to the U.S. Constitution.”

Mark Abramson, a gun shop owner in Albuquerque, told CBS News he could “not fathom” that the governor’s order was “anything other than an attention-getter.”

Some of Lujan Grisham’s strongest political backers, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, have not weighed in on the issue.

The governor has personal and professional relationships with both Biden and Harris. She was named co-chair of the Biden-Harris transition team and was a candidate for U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. She was also elected chair of the Democratic Governors Association in 2020 and 2021.

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Last year, Biden came to New Mexico to urge voters to reelect Lujan Grisham to the governor’s mansion.

Harris, meanwhile, officiated the governor’s wedding in 2022 to Manuel Cordova in Washington, D.C.