Last month’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, along with the steady decline in approval for Joe Biden specifically and Democrats in general, have many lefties across the country somewhere between skittish and panicked about next year’s midterms.

And while some Democratic politicians may be trying to moderate their messaging on gun control in the hopes of deceiving voters, that’s not the case in New Mexico, apparently. Republican state Rep. Stefani Lord is warning that her Democratic colleagues are planning a full-frontal attack on the right to keep and bear arms after quietly imposing a ban on lawfully carried firearms at the state capitol building known as the Roundhouse.

Activists hired by New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg testified before another interim committee that they demand passage of their “gold standard” for firearms storage – legislation mandating all gun owners keep their firearms unloaded and locked up at all times. Such a proposal is not only unenforceable, but also defies logic as it renders firearms unusable for self-defense in the middle of a crime epidemic. Our nation’s capitol had a similar firearm storage law that was struck down in the D.C. v. Heller Supreme Court case. The Heller decision found restricting immediate access to legally owned firearms was unconstitutional.

Now, paid activists are calling for “data-driven solutions” to stem gun violence and have proposed to add bureaucracy with an Office of Gun Violence at the cost of $20 million. We don’t need to waste $20 million of public money to conclude their gun control measures are nothing more than charades that haven’t made the public any safer. Out-of-touch activists and radical progressives have pushed for restrictions on the Second Amendment and the result has been skyrocketing crime in New Mexico. Such bills as the universal background check law have yielded zero arrests or prosecutions in over two years, and the red flag statute has reportedly been used only four times during the first year it was in effect. Why is this data dismissed? These same activists are calling for expansions of gun laws that produce no results or data, yet so many are dying in our communities due to the failed policies of the progressive bloc of lawmakers.

As Lord correctly points out, the two biggest gun control measures that Democrats in the state have rammed through in recent years have proven themselves to be utterly worthless at preventing or even reducing violent crime. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. Back in April of this year, for instance, there were already signs that Albuquerque’s homicide rate was headed towards historic highs.

“Drug-related homicides are definitely up this year — quite a bit,” says Gilbert Gallegos. And a lot of the homicides have occurred in hotels and motels, he says. Some of those are drug deals gone wrong.

“Young people are getting together — usually through social media — to sell a small amount of drugs or guns,” Gallegos says, “and they meet up somewhere and the one party robs the other party and then it turns into a shooting or homicide.” Not all of Albuquerque’s homicides start this way, but recently APD has seen more of these kinds of homicides, Gallegos says.

Things haven’t gotten any better in the months since. According to the Albuquerque police, there’ve been more than 100 homicides in the city this year; a new record for the number of murders in the city. But instead of dealing with the connection between illegal drugs and violent crime, the Democrats in control of the state government want to take another bite out of the people’s right to keep and bear arms.

Lord is correct in stating that a storage mandate requiring gun owners to keep their guns inaccessible for the purposes of self-defense would be a violation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller, which found such storage laws clearly unconstitutional. But the constitutionality of the proposal doesn’t appear to be cutting into Democratic support for the measure, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual language of the legislation includes some sort of caveat for firearms that are “under the control” of the legal gun owner in the hopes of avoiding a lawsuit.

From both a political and public safety perspective the smart move for New Mexico Democrats would be to back off their anti-gun agenda, but the Left is too wedded to its anti-gun ideology for them to really distance themselves from their gun-banning ways. And unfortunately for New Mexico gun owners, the Democrats are going to get one more crack at their Second Amendment rights before Election Day rolls around and voters have the opportunity to replace lawmakers that want to make life miserable for legal gun owners while giving the state’s violent criminals a pass.