Each day over the past week, law enforcement officers in and around Santa Fe dealt with gun-related incidents, from accidents to threats to shootings — and even a homicide.
Together, they illustrate how firearms have come to play a larger role in resolving many day-to-day conflicts in Santa Fe.
Take the weekend, for example.
Before 8 a.m. Sunday, Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputies pulled over a man near La Cieneguilla on suspicion of a windshield tint violation and ultimately found a pistol in the man’s trunk as well as a shotgun recently reported stolen from the Big 5 sporting goods store in Santa Fe.
About 12 hours later, Santa Fe police were dispatched to Galisteo Street, where officers alleged a man was sleeping on a public bench with a handgun sitting beside him. He told police he was carrying the gun because he was worried about “the incidents that have been happening in the area,” police wrote in a report, and he’d had four beers before falling asleep on the bench.
A little more than an hour after that, another man called police alleging his brother-in-law had taken out a shotgun and fired at him and his vehicle in the parking lot of an Allsup’s gas station on Cerrillos Road.
All the while, Santa Fe police detectives were investigating a shooting that had taken a man’s life days before in De Vargas Park.
These were just a few of the gun-related incidents in and around the city over the course of a week — in a time when, law enforcement officials say, the prevalence of guns seems to have increased.
Over the weekend, a 17-year-old high school student went to police alleging a man had threatened him with a gun days before, according to court records.
The boy said he had taken an Uber to get to school one day last week and accidentally left his phone in the driver’s car. After tracking the phone to a house on the south side, he knocked on the door and asked the man for his cellphone, the boy told officers.
The man yelled at him and then grabbed a shotgun, loaded it with yellow slugs and pointed it at him, the boy told police.
The boy ran off, he said, “frightened for his life.” An officer wrote the boy’s hands were shaking “with what appeared to be fear” as he recounted the story.
‘It’s so normalized’
Such incidents can lead to more violence, said Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence. She facilitates workshops with youth to teach about gun safety, and she said she hears “over and over again” from young people that they first sought out a gun as a result of someone threatening them with one.
“Think about all the times when the police aren’t even called,” she said. “Because it’s so normalized — normalized to the point of complete insanity — that we’re living in a state where our reaction to any kind of altercation is to brandish a gun.”
Ben Baker, a public safety adviser to the governor, said he receives a notification whenever a child is arrested for a crime involving a firearm across New Mexico, and he received those alerts two out of every three days in the last calendar year.
He pointed to two groups of people prohibited from having guns — young people and people who have been convicted of a felony — as showing increasing numbers of gun possession in recent years.
“New Mexico is experiencing a gun crime and gun violence crisis — there’s no question about it,” he said. “More felons are being arrested with guns than we’ve ever had, and more children are being arrested with guns than we’ve ever had, and that’s statewide, so this is not an Albuquerque- or Santa Fe-specific data point. It impacts all of our communities. All over the state, the story is the same, irrespective of the geography or the politics of the community.”
He pointed to “black market and gray market” sources where youth and felons purchase guns — many of which are stolen — such as social media apps like Telegram.
He also pointed to fatal incidents involving teenagers and guns in Bernalillo and Las Cruces just after the recent legislative session, including a report of teens at the site of a mass shooting in Las Cruces who were pointing a light on the front end of an AR-15 at a car to illuminate it to film a TikTok video.
Three were killed and dozens were injured in the shooting.
“I can tell you, I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and I don’t remember a time where the flippant use and the almost disregard for the seriousness that introducing a firearm into any equation exists worse than it does today,” he said.
The prevalence of guns in crimes has increased in recent years, Baker said, noting some law enforcement agencies across the state have reported their gun evidence storage facilities are “near capacity” as they’re waiting to try crimes involving guns.
‘Bad judgment calls’
On Wednesday morning, a La Cienega man was accused of brandishing a handgun at a tow truck driver who had come to help him tow his pickup truck after the two got into an argument.
The man told police he had spoken with the tow truck driver on the phone, an affidavit states, and the driver said if there wasn’t somewhere for him to turn around on the street “he was going to be pissed.”
The man said he put his handgun into his waistband before meeting the man outside, police wrote. The two argued about the tow job and then struggled on the ground before the pickup owner pointed his firearm at the tow truck driver, the driver told officers.
The other man told police he had only put his hand on his gun and never pointed it at the driver.
Later that evening, a Chimayó man suffered gunshot wounds to two of his fingers in an accident with a rifle at a shooting range in Nambé, according to a report provided by Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
The 24-year-old man and his girlfriend both told police he had handled the gun properly, but after he fired it, he saw blood and felt pain in his hand.
Santa Fe police Deputy Chief Ben Valdez said the prevalence of firearms on the streets and in the homes and cars of Santa Fe has increased over the decades he has worked in law enforcement in the city. In the past, shootings were considered to be “rare incidents” in Santa Fe, he said.
“From our standpoint with our officers, when they’re responding to calls, they’re seeing a lot more incidents that have either firearms that are present or individuals that are armed with firearms than we used to experience,” Valdez said, “and they’ve even changed the way that they do their response to that to make sure that they can do everything they can to safely navigate that situation.”
Reports of domestic violence that used to require two or three officers, at most, are now requiring four officers and a supervisor if there is an allegation of a firearm at the scene.
“We have to have a less-lethal option — we have our folks that are trained in those types of techniques to communicate with folks so we can try to avoid a lethal force encounter,” Valdez said. “And you know, it’s more of a tactical approach than we had to do before.”
Valdez pointed to more equipment that is required for law enforcement in an age of more prevalent gun use, including better tourniquets for treating gunshot wounds before medical personnel arrive at a scene and hardier bulletproof armor such as “rifle plates.”
He pointed to several gun-related incidents over the last year that resulted in arrests, including a gas station attendant who fired at the feet of a homeless man outside his store and two teen boys at Capital High School who filmed a video of one of the boys with a handgun in a school bathroom and posted it to TikTok.
On Thursday night, a man was arrested outside the Chomp food hall after others alleged he was intoxicated and had brandished a handgun during a fight at New Mexico Hard Cider Taproom.
The man, who was from Dallas, admitted to officers he had racked the gun several times, saying the gun was his “first resort” after he had been struck by other customers, police wrote.
“It’s like, man, these are just bad judgment calls,” Valdez said. “And if we could have just not had that behavior, that incident may have been avoided — and it’s pretty sad, you know.”
