Guns are a salvation to the innocent and a hinderence to the criminal

Over at Bearing Arms today, Cam Edwards has an interesting analysis of the recent infringement of the Second Amendment by the NM governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. His take is that the gun-grabbers are losing. But rather than rethink their positions, they are doubling down. You can read the article at Michelle Lujan Grisham Tries To Revive Democrats' "Massive Resistance" to Civil Rights. To set the table, Edwards recalls the Democrats resistance to Brown v. Board of Education in Farmville, Virginia in 1954:

Just off the main drag in Farmville, Virginia there’s an unassuming brick building next to a brightly painted tarpaper structure. The unobtrusive sign out front identifies the building at the Robert Russa Moton Museum; a largely unknown place that was the site of one of the most significant events in the civil rights movement. The museum was once R.R. Moton High School, the black public high school in Prince Edward County. In 1951, then 15-year-old Barbara Johns led her fellow students on a walkout in protest of the deplorable conditions of the building and the education they received.

...snip...

While Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, public schools weren’t integrated in Prince Edward County for another decade. The school system dragged out any attempt to abide by the decision for years, and when that became untenable the county decided to shut down the public schools entirely rather than integrate. The “Massive Resistance” movement eventually resulted in several communities shuttering their schools, though none for as long as Prince Edward County. It took another Supreme Court decision in 1964 to re-open the schools, this time to both black and white students.

When I first moved to the Farmville area a decade ago I met a man who’d spent several years being taught in a church basement and in the living rooms of family and friends by parents and other adults who refused to let kids go unschooled. In fact, he was the one who told me about this shameful history in the first place.

Both Farmville and the nation at large have come a long way since 1951. Sadly, Massive Resistance to a Supreme Court decision is making a comeback among Democrats, and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham seems intent on becoming the standard bearer for the movement.

Edwards then draws a comparison between the Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s, who believed, incorrectly, in segregation of the two races to the Democrats of today who believe, again incorrectly, that gun control is crime control. This despite all the evidence to the contrary. The citizen that obtains a permit to carry concealed is not the one shooting up the neighborhood and killing innocent bystanders.  He is not the one doing drive by shootings or committing mass murder, much as the new media salivates for it to be true.  Further, the criminals, as Grisham admits, will not be dissuaded by any edict she might make. But, like Democrats before, she is doubling down.

Like her fellow civil rights suppressors in the 1950s and 60s, Grisham is ultimately lashing out because she’s losing. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and there’s a portion of the gun control movement that believes it’s time to start lobbing Hail Marys through executive orders and tossing verbal hand grenades at the Supreme Court over Bruen, while the more institutional wing seems intent on taking a more traditional incrementalist approach. If Grisham thought she was acting in a position of strength in proclaiming a constitutional right suspended because of a self-proclaimed public health emergency (at a time when homicides are actually trending down in Albuquerque, by the way), the backlash from many of her fellow Democrats and the refusal to enforce her order by local and state officials should have disabused her of her delusions. I think she was well aware of the weakness of her position before she made her announcement. She just decided if she was going to “do something”, she might as well do something big.

Grisham has backed down slightly from her original order, a decision I suspect that is almost entirely based on the unwillingness of police and prosecutors to go along. Massive Resistance implies mass, after all, and in Grisham’s case she (so far, anyway) hasn’t had the institutional backing she needs to pull off her unconstitutional scheme. That may have even factored into her decision to revise her original order instead of bringing lawmakers back to Santa Fe for a special session to address this “emergency”; she knows that she doesn’t have the political capital at the moment to control the outcome and ensure that her desired gun control bills get passed.

Let us hope that Edwards is correct, and that we are in the last stages of gun bigotry. Guns are inanimate tools, nothing more. Properly used, they are a hiderance to the two legged predetor and a salvation to the innocent.