ACLU threatens lawsuit on guns at town meetings

First, state lawmakers voted to ban firearms and other weapons in the Capitol.

Then, Estancia Mayor Nathan Dial joined two members of his board of trustees in passing a rule requiring people who attend town meetings to come armed.

Now, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico is threatening to sue Estancia if it doesn’t rescind the rule.

The ACLU sent Dial, an Army veteran who has served as Estancia’s mayor since 2018, a letter Friday saying the town’s ruling is “an affront to the United States Constitution, the Open Meetings Act and common sense.”

If the town’s trustees do not change course by Nov. 30, the ACLU will “initiate a lawsuit against the town for constitutional and statutory violations and seek an order enjoining the town from enforcing the rule,” according to the letter, signed by Maria Martinez Sanchez, deputy legal director for the ACLU of New Mexico. Efforts to reach Sanchez on Sunday, when the ACLU office is generally closed, were unsuccessful.

When reached by phone Sunday, Dial sounded nonplussed about the threat. But, he said, he is planning to respond to the ACLU letter and agrees some of the language of the rule, passed on a 3-2 vote last Monday, may be too vague.

“I did it so vague for shock value,” said Dial, who has an open-carry permit and wears a pistol on his hip “almost every day, all day.”

He said he is just following in the footsteps of what state lawmakers did when they convened a meeting on Nov. 1 and voted 8-5 to enact the ban effective Dec. 6, when a planned special session on redistricting is expected to begin. Estancia’s rule goes into effect the next day.

Dial said the Estancia rule asks people attending town meetings to “acknowledge” they are prepared to defend their beliefs with whatever weapons they feel they need to mount such a defense.

He said that doesn’t mean they need to carry guns into the meeting. He said the arms in question can be fists, knowledge or “open carry. It’s not designed to get people up in arms or for people to have a gun.”

The ACLU letter says it doesn’t matter what kind of arms are involved because the rule is not proper or legal. It says the rule violates the state’s Open Meeting Act in that “a mandate that people show up to a meeting with a gun (or otherwise ‘legally armed’) effectively closes that meeting to anyone who does not own an ‘arm’ or who does not wish to carry one into a public meeting.”

Dial said the state initiated the precedent, not Estancia. “If the state can make a rule that supersedes the Constitution and nobody pushes back on it, that’s the precedent,” he said. “It’s been set, and I’m trying to fight back.”

During the 2019 legislative session, Dial showed up at the Capitol with a pistol in a holster on his hip as he sought to seek clarification on then new rules banning guns at joint sessions of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the Capitol. At that time, he said he’d often entered the Capitol with a gun before and never encountered any problems or pushback.

He said his initiative is not about protecting Second Amendment rights but civil rights in general.

“An open carry of a firearm in the state Capitol is a form of expression of the First Amendment,” he said.