Commentary: Being robbed at gunpoint some 15 years ago remains a vivid memory. My attention fastened less on the gun than the gunman. I studied the mugger as a person for clues about his judgment and how much danger my friend and I were facing.
Just our luck, the kid was new at this, an amateur. His hands shook. He was in a sweat, his body was tense, and his finger was on that trigger as he waved the gun and pointed it at my friend’s stomach.
We would have felt safer with a professional, but we got "Flop-sweat Fred." Nevertheless, we negotiated the encounter with no shots fired and no additional holes on anyone’s person.
By the time you read this, 23 of New Mexico’s 33 counties may have declared themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuary counties.”
That includes Luna County, where I live, and whose three-member county commission voted unanimously last Friday to give Sheriff Kelly Gannaway authority to nullify state or federal laws about guns. Quoting from the resolution:
“…Luna County does not and will not support or authorize the use of County funds, property or personnel in furtherance or enforcement of unreasonable and improper laws that are declared to unconstitutionally infringe upon the rights of Luna County citizens to keep and bear arms under the constitution of the United States of America and the State of New Mexico.”
Who decides on a law’s constitutionality? Elementary civics once taught that this was a function of the judiciary, but these county resolutions get their civics from the “constitutional sheriff” movement, which holds that within a county the sheriff is supreme, outranking local police and federal law enforcement.
This imperium apparently overrules even the U.S. Supreme Court, which has ruled that gun regulations do not necessarily infringe on the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
In a 2008 ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote:
"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. For example, concealed weapons prohibitions … possessions of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing condition and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."
There are those, however, who insist on a reality in which the constitution forbids any gun regulations.
These efforts to nullify law, jurisprudence and representative government — based on highly selective readings of the U.S. Constitution — are fascinating yet troubling. Here again, I look past the weapon and wonder about the people holding it.
Sheriff Gannaway, like many of his counterparts, opposes bills instituting background checks and “red flag” legislation aiming to disarm temporarily people who may be suicidal or restrict access to weapons for those subject to domestic abuse orders.
His opinion as a law enforcement professional is valuable in a reality where Americans think and argue about gun regulations, but such conversations are sadly rare.
The dominant impulse, increasingly, is to prevent any such conversation from happening, demonize those whose opinions disagree with ours and forbid ourselves any opportunity to think.
With the erosion of civic skills such as dialogue and good-faith negotiation, gradually follows erosion of representative governance and a common belief that political competition and honest debate can lead us somewhere better.
Is New Mexico normalizing the idea that when democracy brings about a result we don't like, instead of engaging in political struggle we shall declare it illegitimate, flip the table and take up arms?
This development represents an erosion of democracy from within. We would do better to slow down, think and converse.
Algernon D'Ammassa is Desert Sage. Share your thoughts at adammassa@lcsun-news.com.