The accidental shooting death of 2-year-old Lincoln Harmon of Rio Rancho was both tragic and preventable.
His parents will likely forever feel haunting remorse for keeping a firearm in a kitchen cabinet of their home, where Lincoln’s 4-year-old brother found it while looking for chewing gum and accidentally shot Lincoln beneath his lip on Dec. 8, 2021.
The 4-year-old told police he used a kitchen chair to reach the countertop and then the highest kitchen shelf where the gum was, along with his father’s loaded gun. He liked to play “dress up” with police gear. The burden he’ll bear for the rest of his life is also unimaginable.
The firearm was the off-duty gun of Lincoln’s father, Santa Fe police officer Jonathan Harmon, who along with his wife were in other rooms in the home when the tragedy occurred in the kitchen.
The state Attorney General’s Office spent months reviewing the case for possible prosecution, but former Attorney General Hector Balderas said last week his office hadn’t finished its assessment. He turned the case over to new Attorney General Raúl Torrez to consider whether there was “criminal culpability” related to the storage of the weapon.
Balderas says the Rio Rancho case illustrates a “blind spot” in New Mexico law. He says prosecutors lack statutes providing “middle-of-the-road tools” regarding gun storage between misdemeanor charges of negligent use of a firearm and felony charges of child abuse. It’s instances just like Lincoln’s death that cry out for a gun safety law, such as the Bennie Hargrove bill that failed to pass in the 2022 regular session.
Balderas says if New Mexico had had a law criminalizing unsafe gun storage, there probably would have been criminal charges filed in connection to Lincoln’s death. And that’s where we hope prosecutorial discretion could come into play, given the pain the Harmon family has already suffered.
But what if a neighbor’s child had gotten a hold of Harmon’s gun and accidentally shot himself, someone else or taken the gun to school? What if a burglar had found the gun and used it to kill someone? There have been 1,100 to 1,400 guns stolen each year in Albuquerque in recent years, most from homes and vehicles, and many of them have subsequently been used in property and violent crimes. Shouldn’t gun owners bear some responsibility for not properly securing their weapons?
State Rep. Pamelya Herndon, D-Albuquerque, sponsored the Bennie Hargrove bill that died in committee last year. The bill is named after Bennie Hargrove, who was killed at an Albuquerque middle school in August 2021 by another 13-year-old who had brought his father’s handgun to school.
Herndon plans to introduce the bill again for the upcoming 60-day session after making tweaks, such as indemnifying adults whose guns are obtained by minors during robberies.
State legislators over the last three years have passed bills expanding background check requirements for firearm purchases and allowing guns to be seized from individuals deemed to pose a threat to themselves or others. A safe gun storage law should be an easy one — they’ve been adopted in more than two dozen states — and New Mexico’s firearm fatality rate is among the nation’s highest. A total of 562 state residents died in 2021 due to firearm-related injuries — up significantly from 481 firearm-related deaths in 2020.
To those who say “We’ve already got laws on the books,” and “We don’t need a safe storage bill,” we’ve got a former attorney general who begs to differ.
Lawmakers can debate and address what constitutes safe and secure gun storage, whether it be lock boxes, safes or otherwise. But keeping a loaded gun on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet is not responsible gun ownership. Lawmakers need to find that “middle ground” Balderas mentions and pass the Bennie Hargrove bill.
This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
