Albuquerque has at least one shooting daily, usually two or three. The Duke City has suffered 81 homicides in 2021, an average of one every three days. They had 185 shootings with injuries so far this year. It’s August. Of the 165 shootings in 2020, 59 died.
Three cops were shot Aug. 19 in Albuquerque, which hearkens to the wild west where the local law sometimes had to shoot it out in the street to clean out the bad guy(s).
In the same week a 13-year-old boy shot and killed another 13-year-old boy at an Albuquerque middle school.
Always, the result of any kind of shooting brings out the left to say, “pass more laws,” and the right to say, “second amendment rights, “arm teachers,” or “carry your own gun.”
Admittedly twice over the summer national news carried stories of an armed citizen shooting someone who was shooting at people for some racist reason, stopping the shooter.
Two armed parishioners shot and killed a man in Texas in 2019, who came in to shoot up their church. Parishioners started arming themselves after the many church shootings in 2018 and 2019.
Short term this seems like a pretty good approach. Dead shooter, no judicial snafus or weak-kneed judge to interfere, taxpayers saved a ton of money.
However, you have to take into account the average citizen, including children, witnessing a shootout in their church. That sort of psychological scarring never heals.
Albuquerque is unusual but it’s at the pointy edge of a trend in the United States. It is not alone. In June, twice in one week law enforcement in Española shot someone. In one case a man died at Ranchitos Park and in another situation a dangerous felon was shot by a State Police officer but managed to run away. He was captured last week in La Mesilla.
It’s clearly a different pathos for gun-toting criminals. The little respect they had for law enforcement has been removed. Either out of desperation or the effects of drugs and alcohol, when a cop yells, “Stop!” it means run faster to most of the criminal element.
What to do?
In the past four years the New Mexico legislature has considered 41 bills regarding regulating guns, controlling gun purchases, notifications of guns and purchases and restricting access to certain people.
Twenty-nine of the bills died in some manner wending their way through the laborious legislative process. The 12 that passed range from ordering a study and allowing retired cops to carry guns on school grounds to the two most contentious bills to come out of the legislature.
Both of those bills were successfully carried by former state senator Richard Martinez.
He rocked the boat big time in 2018 by getting a bill passed and signed that would allow a gun owner to sell a gun to immediate family without a background check but not their neighbor or hunting buddy.
Naturally sheriffs around the state threw collective and individual hissy fits, with much braggadocio stating they would not enforce the law, despite taking an oath to do just that. In our experience most sheriffs treat laws as a cafeteria line and support what they want, when it suits them.
This law was to address the legal sale of firearms from one person to another. It had no affect on dealers at gun shows or in stores or pawn shops. Those people all must do background checks.
Television station KRQE in Albuquerque checked court records and found as of August 2020, no one had been arrested for not conducting a proper background check when selling in a private sale. That doesn’t mean there have been no private gun sales with or without background checks.
To find out how many people legally contacted the FBI and did a proper background check you’d have to deal with the FBI. Good luck with that.
Speaking of the FBI, it released a study earlier this year that states almost 70 percent of school shootings were carried out with a gun the shooter acquired from a family member or friend. So right now everyone is hitting hard on the new law in New Mexico that states the person supposedly in charge of the weapon can be prosecuted for not properly securing the weapon. More laws, more legal battles, the bloodshed goes on, lawyers make money.
There is no single answer here. Just like the mass shootings, to which we have all become numb, ignorant people, feeling they have no option, will continue to use guns to make solvable matters much worse.
But right now, go check that your firearm is properly stored and no one, especially a teen or child, can get to it. Don’t promote firearm safety, live it. It will stop a lot of these senseless killings.