Federal judge won't block suspension of right to carry guns in some New Mexico parks, playgrounds - By Morgan Lee Associated Press
A federal judge cleared the way Wednesday for enforcement of a public health order that suspends the right to carry guns at public parks and playgrounds in New Mexico's largest metro area.
The order from U.S. District Judge David Urias rejects a request from gun rights advocates to block temporary firearms restrictions as legal challenges move forward.
It marks a victory for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and her advocacy for temporary gun restrictions in response to recent shootings around the state that left children dead.
The standoff is one of many in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year expanding gun rights, as leaders in politically liberal-leaning states explore new avenues for restrictions.
In New Mexico, the restrictions have ignited a furor of public protests, prompted Republican calls for the governor's impeachment and widened divisions among top Democratic officials.
Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, continued to argue this week that some sensitive public spaces should be off limits for open or concealed carry of firearms.
Gun rights advocates have filed an array of lawsuits and court motions aimed at blocking the restrictions in her order, arguing that even a new, scaled-back version would deprive Albuquerque-area residents of 2nd Amendment rights to carry in public for self-defense.
But in denying the request for injunction, the judge ruled that the plaintiffs had not shown a substantial likelihood of success in court. He rejected arguments that gun restrictions for "sensitive" places should apply only to locations for core government functions, such as polling places, and not playgrounds.
"Given the Supreme Court's recognition of schools as sensitive places and the sound analogy between schools and playgrounds ... the court finds that the recognition of what constitutes a sensitive place could very well be determined by the type of function occurring at those locations as well as whether a vulnerable population — such as children — utilize such locations," Urias wrote.
Urias also said it appears "plausible, although not certain" that the governor may "demonstrate a national historical tradition of firearm restrictions at public parks within cities."
Zachary Fort, who is a plaintiff in several consolidated lawsuits challenging the gun restrictions, said he carries in public parks for self-defense when he can.
"I was disappointed in the judge's decision today, but I think it's too early to say now what our next steps are going to be," Fort said.
The governor's initial order would have suspended gun-carry rights in most public places in the Albuquerque area, while the current version applies only to public parks and playgrounds with an exception that ensures access to a municipal shooting range park. The restrictions were tied to a statistical threshold for violent crime that applies only to Albuquerque and the surrounding area.
State police have authority under the order to assess civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, but the sheriff and Albuquerque's police chief had refused to enforce it.
The rest of the public health order has remained intact, including directives for monthly inspections of firearms dealers statewide, reports on gunshot victims at New Mexico hospitals, wastewater testing for illicit substances at schools, safe-surrender programs for gun owners who choose to decommission firearms they no longer want and more.
A temporary restraining order that previously blocked the gun restrictions was to expire at the end of Wednesday.
Preliminary hearing scheduled in case of attempted murder at Española event - Alice Fordham, KUNM News
A preliminary hearing is scheduled Friday morning in the case of a man who allegedly shot a peaceful Indigenous activist during a rally in Española last month.
Ryan Martinez is charged with the attempted murder of Jacob Johns and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon against another participant, Malaya Peixinho.
The state is seeking pre-trial detention for Martinez, who traveled from Sandia Park to the prayer and celebration event in Española. Participants were celebrating a decision not to immediately re-erect a statue of the conquistador Juan de Oñate, who violently oppressed Native people.
Witnesses, whose testimony is supported by videos and photographs, say Martinez rushed at a group of participants and fired a handgun after several people tried to hold him back.
The petition for Martinez to be detained before his trial notes that the injuries to Jacob Johns were severe. The bullet entered his left chest, collapsed a lung, struck the spleen, liver and stomach and caused a life-threatening risk of infection.
Organizers of a fundraiser for Johns's medical expenses posted an update on October 9, saying he was experiencing fevers and difficulty breathing due to organ damage. He was at that time awaiting a third surgery.
Supporters of Johns are expected to gather at the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla Friday in an expression of support and solidarity.
George R. R. Martin to discuss artificial intelligence with U.S. Senator Heinrich - Alice Fordham, KUNM News
The writer George R. R. Martin will join the U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich in Santa Fe Friday afternoon to discuss the influence of artificial intelligence in arts and culture, and how it could affect New Mexico's economy.
They'll be joined by UNM Professor and Santa Fe Institute external faculty member Melanie Moses
The free event will be at the Violet Crown cinema. Seats can be reserved online in advance. The conversation will be moderated by the Santa Fe Reporter's Julia Goldberg.
Heinrich is the Founder and Co-Chair of the Senate AI Caucus. He has worked on legislation and policy around the new technology which seems set to change many industries and aspects of life.
Martin warned lawmakers earlier this year that the rise of the new tech has made actors and writers nervous about their jobs, as the ability of machines to replicate images and write stories grows.
Ruidoso sues PNM over McBride Fire, alleges negligence - Albuquerque Journal, KUNM News
The village of Ruidoso has sued the Public Service Co. of New Mexico — or “PNM” — alleging the utility’s negligence caused last year’s McBride Fire.
The Albuquerque Journal reports the village accuses PNM of not maintaining vegetation along its power lines.
According to the lawsuit, winds toppled a tree into a PNM line on April 12th, 2022. A resulting spark then lit nearby vegetation and debris on fire.
The McBride Fire burned around 62-hundred acres, destroying homes and businesses and killing two elderly residents. Flooding on the burn scar later caused additional damage.
The village is seeking unspecified damages in the case.
A spokesperson for PNM told the Journal the company can’t comment on pending litigation.
Rio Arriba shooter supported 2020 Oñate shooting, online posts show radical rabbit hole - By Andrew Beale, Source New Mexico
Ryan Martinez, the Donald Trump supporter who shot activist Jacob Johns (Hopi, Akimel O’odham) last month at a prayer vigil where a statue of war criminal Juan de Oñate was set to be installed, had an extensive history of posting and engaging with extremist content on social media, a review of archived posts by Source NM found.
In hundreds of posts spanning a two-year timeframe, he repeatedly expressed belief in the QAnon conspiracy theory, advocated violence against Democrat officials and frequently used racist and antisemitic language and homophobic and sexist slurs.
He also reacted with enthusiastic support to news of a separate shooting by another Trump supporter at a statue of Oñate outside Albuquerque in 2020.
Martinez is charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault for the shooting, and was denied release pending trial after the FBI reported he had a history of violent threats on social media. He will face a state district court judge in Tierra Amarilla on Friday morning.
John Day, an attorney representing Johns, said as of Tuesday that Johns was still at University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque and his condition was unstable. The hospital has scheduled and then delayed multiple surgeries because they’re worried he couldn’t make it through them, Day said.
Day also wants Martinez to be charged with a federal hate crime.
‘I WROTE A Q ON MY HAND AND I’M SURE THE PRESIDENT SAW IT’
In a series of posts following a Trump rally in Rio Rancho in 2019, Martinez wrote that rally security took away a sign he made expressing belief in the QAnon conspiracy theory.
He then wrote a letter “Q” on his hand in black marker, and became convinced Trump saw it and was sending him coded messages during the rally.
“I wrote a Q on my hand and I’m sure the president saw it,” he wrote in a post that contained a picture of himself with the Q on his palm.
In a series of follow-up posts, Martinez and other QAnon believers became convinced that Trump tapping the podium during his speech was a coded message, one that Martinez believed was meant for him personally.
“Did you count how many times he was tapping the podium?? … I think he was doing that directed at me,” he wrote.
QAnon adherents falsely believe that Democrats traffic children, sexually abuse them and harvest their brains to stay preternaturally young, and a key demand of the movement is the public execution of Trump’s political enemies.
The conspiracy theory played a major role in the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2020, and believers in the theory carried out a string of murders, terror attacks and kidnappings in the U.S. and abroad during Trump’s presidency.
The FBI has repeatedly warned that followers of the conspiracy theory pose a violent risk to the country’s security.
Martinez frequently interacted with Q-themed content and posted Q slogans dozens of times on a now-deleted social media account, though hundreds of posts are preserved on the Internet Archive. His archived posts cover mid-2018 to late 2020.
Source NM asked his attorney Nicole Moss for comment via email, but did not receive a response. Martinez was initially represented by a public defender before hiring Moss.
SHOOTER REPEATEDLY ADVOCATED POLITICAL VIOLENCE
In 2020, Martinez received a visit from FBI agents over a 2018 tweet that seemingly threatened violenceagainst members of the Federal Reserve.
That post and two others highlighted by the FBI were absent from the archived posts reviewed by Source NM. But other posts by Martinez indicated support for politically-motivated violence.
“@BarackObama ready to be hung?” Martinez posted in 2019.
In response to a Washington Post article about police killing an antifascist activist wanted for the shooting death of a far-right activist without warning or attempting to arrest him–a police shooting that Trump claimed credit for ordering as an act of “retribution”–Martinez wrote “Good.”
Following a 2020 shooting by a Trump supporter at a statue of Oñate near Albuquerque, Martinez blamed Albuquerque mayor Tim Keller for the shooting, and trolled online commentators expressing sadness at the violence.
That shooting was carried out by failed city council candidate Steven Ray Baca after Baca committed a series of physical attacks on anti-Oñate protesters.
Video of the incident showed Baca push a woman from to the ground, injuring her legs; mace a man in the face; push a second woman to the ground, injuring her head; and finally shoot a demonstrator Scott Williams four times in the back at close range with a .40-caliber handgun.
Prosecutors initially charged Baca with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for the shooting, but later dropped that charge. Baca pleaded guilty to battery and aggravated battery for other assaults on protesters and unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon. His sentencing is set for November.
In response to a video of Baca assaulting one of the women, Martinez wrote “I would’ve pushed that (expletive) out of the way too,” using a gendered slur to refer to the woman.
Many other posts on his account were deeply bigoted, with frequent use of anti-gay slurs and gendered insults.
Martinez also posted numerous racist and antisemitic messages, telling an American of foreign descent to leave the country and advocating for other nonwhite Americans accused of crimes to lose their citizenship.
He asserted then-candidate Kamala Harris was “Indian” instead of American.
And he frequently posted antisemitic conspiracy theories about liberal philanthropist George Soros and wondered if right-wing commentator Matt Drudge was an Israeli spy.
EXPERTS SAY ONLINE SPREAD OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES INCREASE RISK OF VIOLENCE
Three experts interviewed by Source NM said that while they couldn’t comment on Martinez’s specific motivations, in general QAnon and related conspiracy theories have a high risk of motivating adherents to violence.
A belief in conspiracies like QAnon or false claims that the election was stolen from Trump, which he also expressed belief in, can cause people to “feel like they have to act on their own to fix it,” according to Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research, analysis and reporting at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “That’s really concerning, because then there is a propensity towards violence and other forms of harm,” she said.
Stolen election conspiracy theories allegedly motivated a string of shootings in the Albuquerque area following the election last year, with failed New Mexico House candidate Solomon Peña charged with organizing shootings at the residences of Democratic officials and thereby interfering with the elections.
Jessica Feezell, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Mexico who studies the relationship between social media and political behavior, said most people who believe in conspiracy theories don’t turn to violence, and it’s unclear exactly what factors cause someone to take violent actions based on false beliefs.
“Probably it is an intersectional result of a lot of different variables. It could be their mental health, it could be socioeconomic status, it could be their age,” she said.
One factor increasing the risk of political violence is that Republican politicians have become increasingly unwilling to denounce violence by their supporters, Feezell said.
“I don’t remember hearing any instances of Republican leadership taking a position that actively discourages acts of violence,” she said. “People like Donald Trump will regularly go on the media to say that the election is rigged (and) to actually say that shoplifters should be shot and generals should be tried for treason. Those statements have consequences for people that follow him.”
Threats against Democrats, some encouraged by Republican officials, proliferated on social media in recent weeks following governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s emergency public health order that included a gun ban in Bernalillo County before it was stopped by a federal judge.
Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said that conspiracy theories like QAnon “tend to attract people that may be disposed in one way or another to these kinds of (violent) actions.”
And the equation works the other way around, with people attracted to QAnon encouraged to commit violence by the belief system itself, he said.
“For people to take dramatic actions based on a very dramatic belief system isn’t a complete surprise,” Holt said. “These kind of conspiracy theories are still quite powerful and motivating (the) kind of hyperactive fringe to behave badly and make people feel that they’re in danger even if they aren’t actually in danger.”
Like other experts interviewed, Holt said that it’s too early to determine Martinez’s motivations for the shooting or whether it was directly inspired by QAnon but added “I think it would be a mistake to discount it from the equation.”
Belief that the 2020 election was stolen can also be a powerful motivator to violence, Holt said, and Republican officials and media figures have fanned the flames by endorsing or refusing to condemn false claims of election fraud.
“Nobody cries tears when dictatorships fall. So if you adopt that frame of mind, you can see how somebody might consider priorly unthinkable options might seem viable,” he said. “These kinds of false beliefs, unfortunately they’ve become so commonplace in America today that it’s easy to kind of feel numb to them or forget how extreme the claims that underlie them are.”
Asked whether more politically motivated violence was likely in New Mexico’s future, Carroll Rivas of the SPLC has a dire outlook.
“There are a lot of guns, and there are a lot of people trying to sew division in our communities, and there are a lot of people trying to sew division in New Mexico, so it’s way too likely,” she said.
Source NM Senior Reporter Austin Fisher contributed reporting.
Former U.S. Attorney Damon Martinez enters Bernalillo DA race – Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico In Depth
The former U.S. attorney for New Mexico plans to run for Bernalillo County district attorney in the Democratic primary next year.
The Albuquerque Journal reports Damon Martinez will challenge current DA Sam Bregman, who said in June he will run to retain his post. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham appointed Bregman in January when his predecessor, Raúl Torrez, won election to be attorney general.
Martinez was one of 14 attorneys who applied for the DA post. He also ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. House District 1, losing to Deb Haaland.
Martinez served as U.S. attorney for New Mexico from May 2014 until his resignation in March 2017. He was one of 46 U.S. attorneys asked to resign by then-president Donald Trump.
Martinez was hired by Mayor Tim Keller in 2018 as a senior policy advisor with the Albuquerque Police Department. That was controversial with many community groups. According to New Mexico In Depth, Martinez oversaw a large-scale federal law enforcement operation in 2016 in which agents arrested a disproportionately high number of black people for relatively minor crimes.
In a statement announcing his candidacy, Martinez referred to violent crime, theft, fentanyl and vandalism and said families are looking for real solutions.
French ballooning team goes the distance to finish ahead in prestigious long-distance race - Associated Press
Spending more than three and a half days aloft and traveling more than 1,653 miles, a French ballooning team has traveled the farthest in the world's oldest and most prestigious air race.
Pilots Eric Decellières and Benoît Havret landed just shy of the North Carolina coast Wednesday after having launched from an annual balloon fiesta in Albuquerque on Saturday night along with 15 other teams representing nine countries.
Organizers of the Gordon Bennett Cup said Decellières and Havret surpassed a German team by about 46 miles to take the lead. The unofficial results will have to be confirmed by a jury of ballooning experts.
The balloonists spend days in the air, carrying everything they need to survive at high altitudes as they search for the right combination of wind currents to push their baskets as far as they can go.
Their hydrogen-filled balloons fly throughout the night and into the next day, with pilots trading off so one can get some sleep while the other keeps an eye on weather conditions. Each team communicates regularly with race officials, their ground crews and meteorologists as they gauge the prospects for pushing ahead.
Two pilots from Poland continued to recover Wednesday in Texas, where their balloon caught fire and crashed after hitting a high-voltage power line while competing.
The race has been held in the United States only 13 times before, and this marked the fifth time the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta played host.
The teams are due back in Albuquerque on Saturday for an awards ceremony.
The race has roots that stretch back to 1906 when adventurer and newspaper tycoon James Gordon Bennett Jr. brought together 16 balloons for a competition that launched from Paris, France.