In 1938, Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) issued a requisite for his fellow ideologues, “Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’”
Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico’s governor, took the mandate to heart and on Friday, declared that the right to carry firearms (whether open or concealed), in Albuquerque and the proximate area of Bernalillo county, was “temporarily” suspended. From an AP report yesterday:
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.
The Democratic governor said she expects legal challenges but was compelled to act because of recent shootings, including the death of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week.
Watch Lujan Grisham read the order below:
When questioned on how she could take an oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution, and simultaneously issue decrees in opposition to the tenets of the document, Lujan Grisham noted that “no constitutional right” is intended to be “absolute.” In her words, there is an “exception” that allows her, or any other politician to seize authority that was never delegated to their office, and that is when there’s an “emergency.” Per Lujan Grisham:
If there’s an emergency, and I’ve declared an emergency for a temporary amount of time, I can invoke additional powers. No constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute. There are restrictions on free speech, there are restrictions on my freedoms.
You can watch the 3-minute video below, it’ll be well-worth your time:
Lujan Grisham is accurate in her assessment that there are restrictions on freedoms, because we aren’t free to go out and indiscriminately murder (unless you live in a hard-blue city), without facing punitive consequences, but murder isn’t a God-given right protected by the supreme law of the land; however, the right to self-defense is, which is the whole point of the Bill of Rights.
It annoys me to no end when conservatives concede (albeit unwittingly) to the left’s war on language (and liberty). Rights do not come from government, they come from God; God, not government, is the ultimate authority. Like the Declaration says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights [emphasis added], that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men [emphasis added], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….
God gave to (endowed) mankind rights that He alone has the authority to revoke, and the sole purpose of government is to secure, or guarantee these rights. To say things like “constitutional right” (as Lujan Grisham did) or “Second Amendment right” is irresponsible — the correct phrase is “constitutionally-protected rights.” The right to self-defense is a right given to mankind by God, and it is a right that is recognized and protected by the Second Amendment. God is entirely a part of the equation, whether people want to accept it or not.
What Zedong said is a timeless aphorism, and since the advent of the gun, it has been understood by every single despot and dictator throughout history and the world over—Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler—so we always knew this was coming. From a September 3rd, 1965 Time article:
For three weeks, Radio Havana has been warning: ‘All citizens must turn in their combat weapons.’
…
The measure may only be in the interest of public safety. Olive Green, the Cuban army magazine, has complained that Cubans tote around lethal automatic weapons ‘as if they were adornments,’ and there has been an appalling number of cases of civilians shooting one another with military firearms.
If you were listening though, you would have heard the pace at which they beat the war drums rapidly increased, when “they” started to conflate gun-grabbing with “health.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a foothold on the gun debate with its “Injury Center” funding research and describes criminal behavior involving guns as a “growing public health problem”; and “gun violence” is almost always described by the media as an “epidemic” and a “pandemic.” Also from AP on Lujan Grisham’s order:
The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order [emphasis added], applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks. The restriction is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met by the metropolitan Albuquerque.
As Friedrich Hayek said:
‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded – and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.