In a rural pocket of New Mexico, Sheriff Ian Fletcher is fighting back against new state firearm laws he calls unconstitutional, decrying “out-of-state gun control groups” in a column the local Catron Courier newspaper published this spring.
“These measures make it harder for law-abiding New Mexicans to exercise their Second Amendment rights, waste scarce law enforcement resources, and do nothing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” the column said.
Fletcher’s missive is part of a campaign among representatives of at least 75 cities and counties nationwide that call themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, opposing enforcement of gun background checks and emergency protection orders.
The only problem: He didn’t write the column; a lobbyist with the National Rifle Association did.
Fletcher says the letter was passed to him by a sheriff’s association and that he’s not “the NRA’s puppet.”
“I didn’t have any direct contact with the NRA, but the letter was probably a little more articulate than I might have been,” Fletcher, who is depicted with an AR-15 on the county’s official website said. “It wasn’t a cut and paste job. I read it and agreed.”
The nation’s firearm debate is playing out in these rural counties, where sheriffs hold broad policing authority, as well as in Denver’s suburbs, where a Republican sheriff is facing recall for backing new laws.
Three flashpoints came in recent days. On one side are groups like the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which exposed the NRA-written columns Monday, and the Giffords Law Center, which released a new analysis of the firearm suicide rates in Second Amendment sanctuaries. On the other are gun rights groups, like those that organized a protest against the new laws at Colorado’s capital Saturday that drew hundreds waving “Don’t tread on me” flags and signs that read “We the people will not give up our guns.”
Colorado passed a so-called “red flag law” in May, becoming the 15th state in addition to Washington, D.C. to do so. Similar legislation is pending in 20 other states.
The proposal failed in New Mexico. The laws allow family, roommates or law enforcement to petition the court for a temporary order to seize firearms from someone deemed to pose a significant danger to themselves or others. An emergency 14-day order can be issued for imminent risk, and a yearlong prohibition of firearm possession can be ordered.
Brady staff suspected the NRA was backing sheriff opposition to the new laws and requested thousands of internal emails using public records laws. The other two papers Brady identified through the emails were the Silver City Daily Press and Deming Headlight, a USA TODAY Network property.
Kris Brown, Brady’s president, said the NRA and the sheriff’s associations were “tied at the hip, going so far as to let the gun lobby essentially run the sheriff’s campaign against these laws in secret.”
Generally, newspaper editors attempt to verify the provenance of letters to ensure their accuracy before publication. The Courier’s editor said she wasn’t surprised to learn that Fletcher’s column was written by the gun rights group.
“It doesn’t really matter because he agrees with those sentiments,” Shannon Donnelly said. “Because it’s in our opinion section I don’t have a problem with him having it ghostwritten.”
The Headlight, which ran an identical piece by Luna County Sheriff Kelly Gannaway, added an editor’s note after learning that the column was written by the NRA and encouraged guest writers to submit original content.
NRA officials defended sending around the sample letters to the editor.
“This is a distraction being pitched to reporters by the Michael Bloomberg-financed gun control lobby in response to the public’s strong opposition to their extreme gun control measures,” said Catherine Mortensen, an NRA spokeswoman. “They are trying to draw attention away from the fact that the New York-style gun control they are pushing on New Mexicans will make law-abiding citizens less safe and won’t do anything to deter criminals.”
Report ties opposition to suicide rates
Opposition to new laws comes from counties with some of the highest firearm suicide rates in the nation, according to the report by Giffords, a gun violence prevention group named for former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, severely injured during a mass shooting in Arizona in 2011.
The analysis focused on counties in Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Washington that have directed their sheriffs to ignore new state laws if they deem them unconstitutional. County resolutions there include language referencing “tyrants throughout history” and say that there is no “persuasive evidence that ‘gun control’ laws actually reduce crime.”
“There’s irony that the folks most resistant to these life-saving laws are in areas with constituents are at the highest risk.”,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel at Giffords.
The report points to places like Custer County, Colorado, where the firearm suicide rate is 32 per 100,000 – four times the state’s average according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In February, the county’s board of commissioners passed a resolution that said the state’s new red flag law is: “in direct conflict with provisions of due process, as outlined in the 4th Amendment, and contradict the right to bear arms.”
Firearms account for more than half of the state’s suicides, according to the Colorado Health Institute.
Colorado’s law kicked off a wave of resolutions and recall efforts of legislators and sheriffs supporting it. A state gun rights group already has challenged the law in court.
Another group, “Rally for our Rights,” has targeted recalls of Tom Sullivan, the Democratic lawmaker who backed the state’s red flag law and Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock, a Republican who supported it.
The debate is intensely personal at times. Sullivan’s son, Alex, was killed in the Aurora theater shooting in 2012 and Spurlock’s deputy, Zack Parrish, was killed in a 2017 shooting, responding to a man with long-standing mental health problems. The new Colorado law is named after him.
In statements to USA TODAY, Sullivan vowed to fight the recall and said he “won’t be bullied by the gun lobby,” and Spurlock said the effort would fail because “the Douglas County citizens support him wholeheartedly.”
Robert Wareham, an attorney in Spurlock’s county, is leading the recall effort and said the law authorizes no-knock warrants to seize firearms that could be abused by spiteful family members. He discounted its impact on suicides.
“People are going to commit suicide whether they have a gun or another method,” Wareham said. “The suicide problem in Douglas County is tough, with affluent, educated white men taking their lives –but that’s a mental health issue and the firearm just expediates a method. Taking guns away won’t solve this.”
Decades of research indicate firearms are the most lethal means of suicide nationwide and the best target for new policy, said Matt Miller, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University.
“The hypothesis that if guns aren’t available someone will find an equally lethal way to take their life seems reasonable, but it falls flat when you look at the data,” Miller said.
Suicide rates nationwide, gun and non-gun, vary from one state to another four-fold – much more fluctuation than any other cause of death.
And that variation, Miller said, is driven almost exclusively by gun suicides. In homes with at least one gun, the risk for suicide is three to four times that of homes with no firearms. Gun suicides are about 90% likely to end in death, Miller added, compared to about 5% or fewer deaths related to pills or cutting.
“Gun owners aren’t more suicidal and don’t have higher rates of mental illness or suicide attempts,” he said, “but they have much higher rates of death if they do attempt.”
Legal fight, jail on horizon
Naming counties “sanctuaries” references sheriffs in left-leaning counties that have resisted enforcement of federal immigration policy. But those local efforts seek to sidestep federal law, while the firearm laws come from state statutes.
Attorneys general in Washington, New Mexico and Colorado have signaled that sheriffs who refuse to enforce the state law will encounter legal headaches.
In Washington, Attorney General Bob Ferguson issued a sternly worded letter that individual chiefs, sheriffs and towns could be held liable if someone illegally obtained a gun and used it to do harm.
In Colorado, newly-elected Attorney General Phil Weiser said sheriffs unwilling to enforce the law should resign.
He pointed to Indiana, with a similar population, which processes about 100 “extreme risk protection orders” to temporary seize firearms – so many counties would issue about one every three years. Last year about 1,700 orders to temporarily seize firearms were issued by judges around the country, according to data from the Associated Press.
“Counties passing these resolutions word them in a way that’s symbolic: instructing sheriffs not to enforce an unconstitutional law – and I agree, but this law is not unconstitutional,” Weiser told USA TODAY. “People get into law enforcement with a commitment to serve and save lives and I predict once this moves from the abstract to concrete cases with real people, it’s going to look a lot different to them.”
In Weld County, the opposition from Sheriff Steve Reams stems from the search and seizure provisions in the state’s new law – and less from broader Second Amendment concerns. He said the law threatens the wide discretionary berth afforded to law enforcement to prioritize laws, something he can sidestep by opting not to have any of his deputies ever petition for a red flag order.
“There’s no other order where we’re to go out and confiscate firearms with a search warrant,” Reams said. “And at that first issuance, the defendant isn’t there to defend themselves in court — it’s an entirely new body of law and it’s troublesome.”
In addition to passively ignoring the law, he said he’s prepared to fight the law either in court, or from a jail cell.
“If a judge said go confiscate these guns and that person wasn’t afforded due process I could not abide,” he said, “and if a judge ordered me to jail for violating the order, that’s the punishment I’d be willing to face.”
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