Hi Outdoor Board,

If any of you are NM residents, please contact your Senator and Rep to make your voice heard.
See email below from the NMSSA. I just sent my email to the committee members this morning.

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On Wednesday, February 11, SB17, the omnibus gun control bill, will be in the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee for its first hearing on the House side. The meeting will be in Room 317 (zoom link), starting at 1:30pm or after the floor session whichever is later. This will be one of the last opportunities to testify against the bill. Below are the contact details for committee members and key points against the bill:

• SB17 would be one of the worst gun and magazine bans in the entire nation. In the Heller decision at the United States Supreme Court, guns "in common use" are protected. Gas-operated semiautomatic rifles are the most common types of rifles sold in the United States today. The Chair of the New Mexico Senate Judiciary Committee stated he believes the bill is unconstitutional.
• The process of how the state would determine what is and isn't covered by the ban isn't clear, "gas-operated firearm" isn't defined anywhere else in state law.
• The State of New Mexico has shown it cannot enforce current laws, this would be the largest expansion of gun laws in state history. Diverting NMDOJ and NMDPS resources to figuring out how to implement and enforce the law would pull their attention away from the actual criminal issues they already struggle with.
• The state recently passed a state-level law making it a felony to straw purchase a firearm for someone who cannot legally poses one, since we already have that law, why does the state need to now go after gun dealers. We need to enforce the law, not make new ones.

Committee Members
doreen.gallegos@nmlegis.gov
Janelle.Anyanonu@nmlegis.gov
joshua.hernandez@nmlegis.gov
gail@gailfornewmexico.com
art.delacruz@nmlegis.gov
derrick.lente@nmlegis.gov
Jimmy.Mason@nmlegis.gov
marian.matthews@nmlegis.gov
mark.murphy@nmlegis.gov
cristina.parajon@nmlegis.gov
linda.serrato@nmlegis.gov

Copyright 2026 New Mexico Shooting Sports Association, All rights reserved.

Is this gonna be a deal where you can't drive through the state with the guns either?

Just like high capacity mags, concealed carry, etc, they pass the bill to make sure they get reelected, then the Supreme Court kills it. Just trying to get folks riled up (on both sides of the aisle)

What has really screwed rural states is when state senators went from being selected at the county level to strictly popular vote. So we get ignored, just like the folks in eastern OR and WA have been.

I don't have to worry, all my weapons are somewhere at the bottom of Quemado Lake.

To add the historical account from wikipedia,

There are typically fewer state senators than there are members of a state's lower house; a senator's job is to represent the people at a higher level than a state representative in the lower house.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_senator#cite_note-1][1][/url] In the past, this meant that senators represented various geographic regions within a state, regardless of the population, as a way of balancing the power of the lower house, which was apportioned according to population. This system changed in 1964, when the Supreme Court of the United States announced in Reynolds v. Sims that state legislatures must apportion seats in both houses according to population.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_senator#cite_note-2][/url]

They've wanted this for decades; they just not figured out that semi's operate on gas system and furiously added it in to sound like they know what they're talking about

Joking, but maybe not....

Surely someone will sue, and ultimately SCOTUS will rule it unconstitutional.

MagnumLoad said:

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Surely someone will sue, and ultimately SCOTUS will rule it unconstitutional.

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I can't imagine that it would ever make it to the point of having to be struck down. For that to happen, it has to pass and be signed into law.

Gov. Lujan is the worst. It's a real shame the libs of Santa Fe and the grifters of Albuquerque have ****ed up such a beautiful state.

Removing the absurdity of most of what they're trying to pass, a state law prohibiting straw purchases isn't necessarily a bad thing. Feds almost never pick up cases for it. Texas actually has a similar law already under PC46.06.

Thankfully it stalled in the house.

VICTORY: SB 17 Stalls in the House

The New Mexico Shooting Sports Association is proud to report a major victory for law-abiding gun owners across our state.
Senate Bill 17 the so-called "Stop Illegal Gun Trade and Extremely Dangerous Weapons Act" has stalled in the House and did not advance before adjournment of the 2026 session of the New Mexico Legislature.
That means:
No semi-automatic firearm ban
No magazine capacity restrictions
No new burdensome dealer mandates
No immediate constitutional fight forced onto New Mexicans

What This Means

SB 17 was one of the most aggressive anti-Second Amendment proposals introduced this session. It would have:

• Restricted commonly owned firearms
• Limited magazine capacity
• Imposed heavy compliance requirements on local firearm dealers
• Opened the door to costly federal litigation against the State

Because of strong grassroots engagement calls, emails, testimony, rally attendance, and direct legislator contact the bill failed to clear the House before the session ended.
This is not accidental.
This is what coordinated advocacy looks like.

Credit Goes To You

This victory belongs to:

• NMSSA members
• The New Mexico Firearms Industry Association and its member businesses
• Firearm retailers who closed their stores to testify
• Women and families who spoke up
• Volunteers who showed up at the Capitol
• Every New Mexican who contacted their Representative

When NMSSA and the New Mexico Firearms Industry Association stand together, we amplify the voice of law-abiding citizens and small businesses across this state.

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We should have never sliced off that chunk of the Republic of Texas. We'd have half of NM, and parts of OK, CO, and WY.

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Funny . . .unfortunately Washington never the Republic of Texas to have that land and we never really owned it. They were happy to back our claim to needle Mexico but then took it from us quickly as part of the Guadalupe Hidalgo negotiations.

That must have been an interesting time . . the Republic of Texas was broke and Andrew Jackson kept shooting down our initial annexation attempts.

Aggie Infantry said:

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We should have never sliced off that chunk of the Republic of Texas. We'd have half of NM, and parts of OK, CO, and WY.

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It was a different world back then, when governments were expected to pay off their debts. Unimaginable today.

Windy City Ag said:

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We should have never sliced off that chunk of the Republic of Texas. We'd have half of NM, and parts of OK, CO, and WY.

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Funny . . .unfortunately Washington never the Republic of Texas to have that land and we never really owned it. They were happy to back our claim to needle Mexico but then took it from us quickly as part of the Guadalupe Hidalgo negotiations.

That must have been an interesting time . . the Republic of Texas was broke and Andrew Jackson kept shooting down our initial annexation attempts.

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The claims of Texas to the Rio Grande and up into Wyoming weren't "taken" by the US. The Compromise of 1850 essentially stated that the US would issue treasury bonds to Texas to pay off Republic of Texas debt in exchange for Texas ceding those lands ot the US. There were 4 or 5 different proposals for the western boundaries of Texas, eventually what we see today was agreed upon and passed.

The northern boundary of Texas as is today was set by the Missouri Compromise. Texas gave up its claims to lands north of 36-30 to maintain its status as a slave state because agriculture drove the economy and politics, which was the basis of most of the Texas economy at the time.

TX_COWDOC said:

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Gov. Lujan is the worst. It's a real shame the libs of Santa Fe and the grifters of Albuquerque have ****ed up such a beautiful state.

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She has been going after guns for years.

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The claims of Texas to the Rio Grande and up into Wyoming weren't "taken" by the US. The Compromise of 1850 essentially stated that the US would issue treasury bonds to Texas to pay off Republic of Texas debt in exchange for Texas ceding those lands ot the US. There were 4 or 5 different proposals for the western boundaries of Texas, eventually what we see today was agreed upon and passed.

The northern boundary of Texas as is today was set by the Missouri Compromise. Texas gave up its claims to lands north of 36-30 to maintain its status as a slave state because agriculture drove the economy and politics, which was the basis of most of the Texas economy at the time.

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Don't disagree with anything here but that doesn't change the fact that the map was just a fabrication of a theoretical territory that never existed. It represented at most a disputed claim by the early Republic of Texas that was not taken seriously by anyone.

New Mexico itself remained part of Mexico and the Republic of Santa Fe expedition sent over by Mirabeau B. Lamer was assaulted by hostile New Mexico residents and sent to Mexico City.

The small section of East New Mexico that Texas tried to claim after the end of the Mexican American War was also disputed with the locals never singing on and President Zachary Taylor publicly disputing the Texian claim to the land.

And yeah, Texas wanted to be a slave state but the economy of the Republic of Texas was also an absolute train wreck during its brief existence and the US exploited that to get what it wanted. Texas was in hock to creditors everywhere, had a rapidly devaluing set of currencies and was basically bankrupt and unable to borrow for all of its existence.

Henry Clay made it all go away by throwing some money at Texas to solve its insolvency problems and used that to also settle the issue of the New Mexico territory that was never part of Texas and did not want to be anyway. Texas getting to "cede the land" was just a rhetorical fig leaf meant to get the deal across finish line and let

Fun read on the subject.

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/debt-of-the-republic-of-texas