Sheriffs Can’t Simply Ignore New Gun Laws
It puts lives at risk
For months, the sheriff of Weld County, Colorado, has been on a media tour to talk about why he’d rather go to jail than enforce his state’s new gun safety law. The legislation empowers law enforcement to temporarily disarm people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others, but Sheriff Steve Reams said he’d prefer to willfully reject court-ordered gun removals.
“Well obviously no sheriff wants to be confined in their own jail, but if that’s what it takes to get this bill ironed out, then I guess that’s a sacrifice I’ll be forced to make,” Reams told CNN.
It sounds surreal, but he isn’t alone. Dozens of sheriffs in states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Washington have declared their counties “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” meaning local law enforcement won’t enforce gun laws they hold to be unconstitutional. In effect, this means sheriffs are declaring themselves arbiters of a wide range of state gun laws that have been enacted by legislatures, and in many cases, proven constitutional in courts.
This wrongheaded stance not only represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution — it puts innocent lives at risk.
Gun violence claimed almost 40,000 lives in 2017 — the highest level in…
