New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s order last Friday involving a 30-day suspension of open carry and concealed carry gun laws within Albuquerque and Bernalillo County has sent the far-right and the New Mexico GOP into an apoplectic fit. Due to considerable blowback from both Republicans and Democrats, the Governor more recently amended the order to apply only to city parks and playgrounds, but that didn’t placate her most vocal critics.

Luan Grisham issued the order following the recent shooting deaths of three Albuquerque youths (including an eleven-year-old boy) earlier this month in a road rage incident. The Governor’s office said that the ruling was enacted in an effort to stamp out drug-related crimes and gun violence in the state’s largest municipalities.

In a formal statement, Governor Grisham said: “As I said yesterday, the time for standard measures has passed. And 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.”

Condemnations by gun rights advocates were swift. A U.S. District judge even responded by temporarily blocking the order, stating that people had a right to carry a gun outside their homes for self-defense. 

State Rep. Stefani Lord (R-Sandia Park), and John Block (R-Rio Rancho), are going full Freedom Caucus by introducing impeachment proceedings against the New Mexico Governor. Lord stated the order “violates the constitutional rights of New Mexicans.”

Lord added,  “I have a newsflash for the governor,” she said in a joint statement with Block. “The Second Amendment is an absolute right and so is my authority to impeach you for violating your oath to New Mexico and the United States.”

Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen announced Friday that he would not back the governor, citing the Second Amendment.

The far right, the NRA, and the GOP love to cite the Second Amendment whenever any lawmaker brings up the subject of gun control. But, does the Second Amendment really say we can all go around carrying a 9mm in our waist bans? 

A key part of the Amendment is “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, conventional wisdom suggests that an individual’s right to bear arms is embedded in the Second Amendment, but this is a relatively recent interpretation. In a Frontline interview, Toobin, author of The Oath, stated that the “overwhelming consensus was that the Second Amendment gave state militias a right to obtain and bear arms, but it did not give individuals any rights.” He added, “The words of the Second Amendment are ungrammatical and difficult to understand in the best of circumstances. But if you look at the history and context of the amendment, including other references to state militias in the Constitution, it suggests that the amendment only applied to state militias.”

Toobin also said in the interview, “What makes this subject so difficult in the modern world is that state militias don’t exist anymore, so we have no familiarity with what a state militia is. But it was simply taken as a given in constitutional law that the Second Amendment did not give individuals a right to bear arms.” The author also pointed out that with the rise of the modern conservative movement in the ’70s and ’80s (aided of course by the NRA) it became the conservative conventional wisdom that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to bear arms.

Interesting, considering that former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Warren Burger argued that the sale, purchase, and use of guns should be regulated like cars and boats and that such regulations would not violate the Second Amendment.

I think the key element in conservative opposition to gun control efforts is the rise in individualism, intense conservative mistrust of big government, and the view that guns make people safer, not more dangerous. Second Amendment activists feel that citizens should take matters into their own hands and arm themselves in order to protect themselves and their families.

As I see it, the Second Amendment doesn’t protect an individual’s right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a well-regulated militia, so conservatives should stop using it as an excuse. Gun violence is an epidemic in this country, yet effective gun legislation is paralyzed by a loose interpretation and twisting of an age-old law crafted in an era when automatic weapons and assault rifles didn’t exist.