Gov.: Heinrich’s assault weapons ban bill will be basis for state’s

Lujan Grisham says renewed push in 2024 session will also focus on regulating guns on ‘lethality of their internal mechanisms’

The Legislature is poised to consider an assault weapons ban that will be mirrored after legislation U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich helped introduce in Congress last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said Monday.

Heinrich’s Gas-Operated Semi-Automatic Firearms Exclusion (GOSAFE) Act “would regulate firearms based on the lethality of their internal mechanisms, as opposed to focusing on cosmetic features that manufacturers can easily modify,” according to his office.

The governor called Heinrich’s proposal good work. “Let’s try that vehicle in our own assault weapons ban in New Mexico because one thing that I have that the senator doesn’t have is I’ve got a set of lawmakers that are more likely than not to have a fair debate about guns, gun violence, weapons of war and keeping New Mexicans safe

than members of Congress are,” Lujan Grisham said.

“I feel pretty good about our ability here,” she added. “We’ll have to see how those votes all shake out, but I think that that’s a game-changer for a lot of places, including New Mexico, so expect to see that on my call.”

The governor had vowed to ask lawmakers during the 30-day session that begins next month to reconsider an assault weapons ban after failing to get several major gun-control measures across the finish line during the 60-day session earlier this year.

Lujan Grisham disclosed her plans while promoting the latest statistics since her administration issued a gun violence public health order, which show 2,490 total arrests since September. Forty percent of the arrests are drug-related, she said.

“Let me just state unequivocally: The public health order [has been] in effect three months, and it’s working,” said Lujan Grisham, who plans to keep it in place. “Are we out of the woods in terms of the public safety issues we are challenged by? We are not.”

In addition to championing an assault weapons ban, Lujan Grisham said she plans to ask lawmakers for more money to recruit and retain police officers.

“I asked for $200 million to get to 1,000 new officers,” she said. “We’re at about 439 statewide. We need to be at 1,000.”

The governor also said she will continue to push for establishing a “rebuttable presumption” to keep repeat violent offenders awaiting trial off the streets instead of letting them be released before trial. The bill was tabled in committee earlier this year amid concerns it was unconstitutional.

“This will be a very strong public safety session,” she said. “Every session has been so, but I want to make sure this momentum is felt by New Mexicans, every single time we can get policymakers in a room to do the work we need to do so that we’re all safer.”

In addition to the thousands of arrests since the public health order went into effect, Lujan Grisham and Ben Baker, her senior public safety adviser, pointed to the seizure of 219 guns in Bernalillo County. An additional 439 guns have been surrendered through gun buyback events.

“Getting guns off the street is a necessary ingredient for success in this public health order,” Baker said.

Lujan Grisham noted while advocating for an assault weapons ban that a not-so-dangerous firearm can easily be modified into what she called a “weapon of war.”

“We don’t know how to define that because somebody comes up with a new kit about every 10 minutes about how to get around it, so then policymakers don’t want to deal with it, and courts don’t know where they are given the Second Amendment, and it gets really dicey, complicated, messy, so we just keep ignoring it,” she said. “Well, Senator Heinrich didn’t.”

The Associated Press reported last week the proposed legislation wouldn’t ban assault weapons outright but would “regulate such guns to have permanently fixed magazines, limited to 10 rounds for rifles and 15 rounds for some heavy-format pistols.”

In an interview last week with MSNBC, Heinrich said he started working on the approach of looking at the internal mechanisms, rather than the cosmetics of firearms, after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nev., in 2017 that left 60 dead and more than 400 wounded.

“I don’t care if a gun has a folding stock or a pistol grip. I care about how deadly it is,” he said in the interview.

“These firearms are in the same sort of bucket as things like fully automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns that we have regulated for nearly a century,” Heinrich continued. “I think it’s long past due that we take an approach that’s really rooted in the physical mechanisms that make some of these firearms so dangerous.”