New Mexico Quietly Bans Gun Shows From State-Owned Property

Above, the Gallup Gun Show at the Gallup Community Center. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

About 22 years ago, I joined in the battle against the liberal majority on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors who wanted to ban gun shows on county-owned property such as the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona (known as the Fairplex).

Unfortunately, we were unable to defeat the ordinance and after it passed, it killed the Great Western Gun Show.

Now, the state of New Mexico is pulling the same stunt in banning gun shows on state-owned property.

From Bearing Arms:

Two years ago, the Democrats in control of the state legislature and governor’s mansion in New Mexico rammed through a universal background check bill over the objections of most of the state’s county sheriffs and tens of thousands of law-abiding gun owners, but the anti-gun politicians haven’t stopped there. Last year they imposed a red-flag law on the state, and now it appears that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has set her sights on gun shows.

According to NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, the New Mexico Gun Collectors Association and the Rocky Mountain Gun Shows have both been told that upcoming shows scheduled to take place at EXPO New Mexico at the State Fairgrounds in Albuquerque have been cancelled because the state is no longer allowing gun shows to take place on state-owned property; a decision that was apparently made without any public input or knowledge. 

EXPO New Mexico is a state agency that, according to its website, works closely with the State Fair Commission to carry out day-to-day operations and host and produce events at the facility.  Governor Lujan Grisham appointed all seven members of the State Fair Commission back in September of 2019.  From the Commission’s website, it appears that the last time the Commission gave notice about a meeting, when it actually met, and the last meeting for which minutes are available, was January of 2020.  Nothing in those minutes mentions EXPO staff or the Commission taking action to end gun shows at the State Fairgrounds.  Further, the New Mexico Legislature has not adopted legislation prohibiting such events on state property.  So where does this sudden misguided policy change come from?

All signs point to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.  Not to be outdone by her Left Coast recall colleague Gavin Newsom and anti-gun extremist lawmakers in the California Legislature who are considering a similar ban, she appears to have wildly wielded her executive power to use a state agency to target gun owners and throw a pre-election year bone to radical gun control activists.  This is in spite of the fact that just two years ago, she signed into law NRA-opposed Senate Bill 8, the so-called “universal background check” bill, which supposedly closed the non-existent “gun show loophole” and required criminal records checks on private firearms sales at such events.

If other shows are allowed on state-owned property, it would seem to be a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution to have gun shows targeted for banning, especially since guns are protected in the Constitution and are legal products. Hopefully, there are some pro-Second Amendment attorneys around who are willing to fight this.

To read more, go here.