The 2021 New Mexico legislative session has to be considered a progressive triumph of historic proportions. After many years of nihilistic, zero-sum thinking, and do-nothing anti-government political ideology that bordered on tyranny, the Democratic controlled Roundhouse has moved New Mexico into a more humane and environmentally sensible modern era, giving our citizens powerful new advantages for the successful exercise of local self-government.
The range of legislative accomplishment is astonishing — from bills that enable the state to set environmental standards greater than those of the federal government to ending the archaic ban on abortion; from pandemic financial relief for small businesses to aid in dying for terminally ill patients; from increased funding for early childhood education to making the New Mexico Constitution the arbiter for local civil rights as well as abolishing “qualified immunity” for public officials; from paid sick leave to legalizing recreational cannabis; from creating a “water trust board” for southwest New Mexico and defunding the Gila River diversion project, which would have ruined the last wild river in the state, to prohibiting the use of snares, traps and poisons on public lands.
In an ideal world, one more law would be on the list of bills the governor has signed this year, one that would initiate innovative local thinking about gun violence and gun control. One day, perhaps next year, New Mexico will find useful ways to impose its will on the sale and purchase of automatic weapons and handguns, create more stringent background checks of every gun purchaser and owner, and perhaps even contribute to the debate of how to revise the Second Amendment.
Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in his book “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” built a strong case for state legislatures taking the lead in pioneering new gun control policies. “Public policies concerning gun control should be decided by the voters’ elected representatives, not by federal judges.” He added that, “across the nation, states and localities vary significantly in the patterns and problems of gun violence, as well as the traditions and cultures of lawful gun use.”
Enforcing policies of rigorous background checks and requiring waiting periods between the purchase and ownership of guns, for instance, might have stopped a tragedy from happening many years ago in Albuquerque when a man with a felony record bought an assault weapon from a gun dealer and shot off a couple of rounds in the air upon leaving the store. One of the bullets ricocheted around a large parking lot. It eventually went up through the floor board of a distant truck and hit a man under his chin, killing him instantly. He’d been innocently having a quiet lunch before going back to work. No civilian should have a high-powered semi-automatic weapon, least of all a felon.
Justice Stevens takes a dim view of the language of the Second Amendment and its use by the gun lobby to demand the “right” of virtually unregulated gun purchases. Justice Stevens quotes former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger as saying that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Stevens wants the Second Amendment revised by adding five words to reflect the Founders wishes to replace the dangers and expenses of maintaining a standing army with self-armed local militias. The revised Amendment would read “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, right right of the people to keep and bear arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”
I hope next year, a progressive New Mexico will get serious about gun control and helping in its own way to prevent the some 88 deaths a day in the United States caused by guns. As this legislative sessions shows, we have the brain power and moral courage make a significant contribution to creating and modeling sane gun laws that protect gun owners, citizens at large, children and anyone else living under the threat of an accidental shooting, a maniac’s lethal random rapid fire, or a stickup artist on the prowl. But it will take serious chutzpah to stand up to the gun lobby.
The most important bills passed this year had strong opposition and required lots of pluck and moxie to get signed into law. Standing out to me is Senate Bill 8, known as the “stringency act,” which allows New Mexico to set higher anti-pollution standards than the federal government and could give us a real chance to make sure that the legacy of plutonium, polonium, and other deadly hot radioactive waste at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories is cleaned up in a more timely manner that it has been over the last dozen years or so since the state cited them both as being an imminent danger to public health.
Doing away with the state’s ancient abortion ban, and finally breaking through the opposition to allowing physicians to prescribe medicines for terminally ill patients to self-administer to end their lives and their suffering are major humane achievements.
The most far reaching bill signed into last this year for me is the New Mexico Civil Rights Act which adds a layer of local protection against abuses of civil rights guaranteed in both the New Mexico and U.S. Constitutions. It also prohibits the use of the defense of “qualified immunity” in civil suits alleging violations of civil rights by public officials. Qualified immunity is an invention of the U.S. Supreme Court in the era of civil rights upheavals in most American cities in the late 1960s. It is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. It’s used mostly to shield police officers from prosecution or civil suits when they make discretionary “mistakes” in judgment that result in wrongful death in confrontations that are not covered by unambiguous guidelines and exact legal precedence.
The 2021 legislative session makes me proud to be a New Mexican, a citizen of a thoughtful, humane, independent minded state that is up to thinking clearly about the most gnarly issues of our times.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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