AP Photo/Morgan Lee
New Mexico’s approach to gun violence has become a case study in ideological stubbornness. Crime rises, homicide rates worsen, and lawmakers respond not by punishing criminals—but by tightening the screws on people already following the law. Gun dealers like Arnie Gallegos aren’t reckless middlemen; they’re frontline gatekeepers who already reject suspicious buyers and risk their livelihoods if they slip up.
Yet instead of enforcing existing straw-purchase laws or targeting gang violence and repeat offenders, Democrats are chasing headlines with dealer-liability schemes that mirror failed policies in New York and California. These laws don’t stop criminals; they scare lawful businesses into paralysis and invite endless litigation.
The data is clear: most crime guns come from theft or black markets, not gun counters. This bill doesn’t address demand, enforcement, or accountability—it just shifts blame. New Mexico doesn’t have a gun-store problem. It has a leadership problem, and until lawmakers confront that, violence will keep climbing while solutions go nowhere.
From Bearing Arms:
In the shadow of Albuquerque’s bustling gun shops, where owners like Arnie Gallegos of ABQ Guns meticulously scrutinize every transaction, New Mexico lawmakers are pushing yet another layer of firearm restrictions. Gallegos, a 15-year veteran at ABQ Guns, embodies the diligence already in place: He flags “unusual patterns” like weekly AR-15 buys, rejecting suspicious customers outright to safeguard his federal license. “If they can’t explain it convincingly, we’re done,” he says, echoing practices that could vanish under fear of retroactive prosecution. Yet leave it to anti-gun politicians to demand more infringements.
The latest anti-2A proposed bill, sponsored by Rep. Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe) and Sen. Heather Berghmans (D-Albuquerque), would require enhanced training and state licensing akin to that for bartenders or cannabis sellers, mandatory inventory tracking, and employee protocols to flag “problematic” customers. With the fifth-highest homicide rate and a 35 percent surge in firearm homicides from 2019 to 2023 (reaching 11.1 per 100,000 residents), the fifth-highest in the nation, New Mexico’s Democrat dominated government continues to blame the firearm, not the shooter.
Despite several gun control laws New Mexico has passed in the last three years alone, violent crime with guns has not been reduced; if anything, it has increased. Rather than focusing on stricter punishment for criminals, like its predecessors, this proposed legislation fixates on law-abiding dealers and buyers while ignoring how criminals actually arm themselves.
To understand the futility of this bill, we can look at New Mexico’s track record. In 2017, Democrats championed universal background checks (UBC) for all gun sales, promising to block criminals from acquiring firearms. The law mandated checks through licensed dealers for private transfers, closing the so-called “gun show loophole.”
Lawmakers hailed it as a game-changer, yet a Johns Hopkins study analyzing states like Colorado and Washington, which enacted similar UBCs around the same time, found no meaningful drop in firearm homicides. Additionally, even New Mexico’s recent state law requiring a seven-day waiting period for firearm purchases has proven to be unsuccessful at reducing violent crimes committed with guns.
In 2023, the state’s “straw purchase ban,” which criminalized buying guns for prohibited persons as a fourth-degree felony, was lauded by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham as a direct assault on trafficking, and empowered state enforcement alongside federal rules. But preliminary data show no reversal in trends. By 2024, gun-related deaths hit an estimated 563, with homicides comprising nearly 40 percent—a stark reminder that new laws haven’t stemmed the tide.
Now, in light of the abject failures of previous legislation, lawmakers are targeting the legal firearms dealers themselves. The proposed bill would mandate “reasonable controls” like security audits and straw-purchase screenings, with criminal penalties for non-compliance if a sold gun later surfaces in a crime. This echoes “dealer accountability” laws in states like New York and California, which impose civil or criminal liability for negligent sales fueling trafficking.
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