Advocates have for years been urging the state to adopt a law that would prevent gun ownership by domestic abusers.
July 17 is the best of days in the Gaytan household, because it marks the birthday of 12-year-old Ian, who lives with his grandparents in a doublewide mobile home on a dirt road in Española. And July 17 is the worst of days, because it marks the anniversary of the shooting death of his 20-year-old mother, Jasmine Gaytan, at the hands of his father, Leroy Fresquez Jr.
Jasmine and Leroy had known each other since their days at Carlos F. Vigil Middle School, the same school Ian now attends. It is the school where the two of them met, and the school from which they both dropped out in seventh grade.
Advocates have for years been urging the state to adopt a law that would prevent gun ownership by domestic abusers. The New Mexico Legislature is expected to vote on such a bill this session. As written, it would require anyone convicted of domestic violence — a well as anyone convicted of stalking or subject to an order of protection — to surrender his firearms to law enforcement within 48 hours. Police and military personnel would be allowed to keep their guns while on duty; gun owners could recover their weapons once the order of protection expired.
Domestic violence is a well-studied problem in New Mexico and throughout the U.S. While individual stories may not attract the same media attention as mass shootings, their collective toll is far greater. According to a 2013 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 10,470 women were killed in intimate partner homicides between 2002 and 2010. A 2003 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that women are five times more likely to be killed if their abuser owns a gun.
Victims so often recant their accusations that some jurisdictions have moved toward laws requiring mandatory arrest and prosecution — with or without the victim’s cooperation. Yet that recanting fails to account for why the conviction rate for domestic violence cases in New Mexico has declined in recent years.
Congress passed laws in 1994 and 1996 that prohibit offenders — those under a long-term permanent protective order or convicted in the assault of a spouse or child — from acquiring or owning a firearm.
To give teeth to federal laws, many states have adopted measures requiring offenders to relinquish firearms to police, or to a neutral third party. Many states go beyond federal law by applying the restrictions to all domestic violence offenders, not just spouses — thereby closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole” that exists under federal law. In New Mexico, studies show the majority of domestic violence incidents are perpetrated by former and current dating partners, not spouses.