This question is different from the eight others because it is a referendum, not an initiative petition. The sponsors are not trying to create something new, they are wanting to reverse something that has already been enacted. And that something is the 2024 Act Modernizing Firearm Laws.

This act is not for the casual reader. Weighing in at 159 sections on 116 printed pages, this is a massive and substantive reform package that took two years to craft and negotiate. The principal sections can be summarized in the following bullet points: 

• Firearms registration: Establishes a statewide, real-time electronic firearms registration system administered by the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services (DCJIS), requiring firearms to be registered and relevant transactions reported.
• Serial numbers and privately made firearms: Establishes serialization requirements for firearms, including privately manufactured firearms, and creates procedures for obtaining and recording identifying serial numbers.
• Firearms licensing: Substantially revises requirements for firearms identification cards and licenses to carry, including eligibility, applications, renewals, disqualifications, and the privileges associated with each license.
• Firearms safety training: Updates basic firearms safety certification requirements, establishes additional training standards, and requires educational materials addressing safe firearm practices and suicide prevention.
• Firearms dealers and gunsmiths: Revises licensing requirements for businesses engaged in selling, transferring, renting, or repairing firearms and ammunition, including premises, security, recordkeeping, and employee requirements.
• Dealer oversight: Establishes additional training requirements for firearms dealers and licensing authorities and strengthens procedures governing inspections, reporting, and compliance.
• Firearms sales and transfers: Revises procedures governing firearms transactions, including private sales and transfers, verification of purchaser eligibility, electronic reporting, and limits on certain transfers between private individuals.
• Assault-style firearms and large-capacity feeding devices: Expands restrictions on possession, sale, transfer, and importation, while establishing registration requirements and specified exceptions for previously lawfully possessed firearms and certain authorized activities.
• Firearm storage and transportation: Updates requirements for securing and transporting firearms, including the use of locked containers, and revises penalties for certain unsafe storage violations.
• Sporting and shooting clubs: Establishes licensing and operational requirements for shooting clubs, including provisions governing ammunition, firearms storage, reporting, and permitted shooting activities.
• Self-defense sprays: Establishes a permitting system allowing certain minors to purchase and possess self-defense sprays, including pepper spray, subject to age and parental authorization requirements.
• Extreme risk protection orders: Expands procedures for obtaining and enforcing extreme risk protection orders, including removing certain firearms-licensing limitations on who may be subject to an order, authorizing seizure warrants, and permitting specified healthcare providers to disclose relevant information.
• Domestic violence and harassment protections: Revises firearms surrender requirements associated with protective orders and establishes procedures for suspending firearms privileges and requiring surrender in certain harassment prevention proceedings.
• Mental health reporting and background checks: Strengthens requirements for transmitting certain involuntary commitment and related records to DCJIS, licensing authorities, and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
• Restrictions on carrying firearms: Revises prohibitions on carrying firearms in specified locations, including government buildings, educational institutions, polling places, and certain private property, subject to statutory exceptions.
• Firearms tracing and data reporting: Expands requirements for tracing firearms associated with criminal incidents, reporting information to state and federal databases, and publishing firearms-related data through a public dashboard.
• Criminal penalties and enforcement: Revises penalties for unlawful firearms sales, transfers, possession, storage, and other violations; establishes additional offenses; and updates criminal statutes to reflect the bill’s revised firearms terminology.
• Violence prevention funding and implementation: Establishes a Violence Prevention Federal Reinvestment Trust Fund, creates commissions and task forces addressing firearms technology, data, training, and violence prevention, and provides for implementation deadlines, regulations, and the continued validity of existing licenses until expiration, suspension, or revocation.
• Technical and Statutory References: Revises and expands statutory definitions, including those for firearms, assault-style firearms, large-capacity feeding devices, privately made firearms, undetectable firearms, and rapid-fire trigger activators.The bill also contains numerous conforming and technical amendments updating terminology and statutory references throughout the General Laws.

Initially, there are many hurdles in reversing 195 sections and 116 pages of legislation. The repeal of a chapter does not revive any previous statute, except in case of a referendum petition. But that causes tremendous practical problems.

Some of the sections that were added or amended might have been amended since. Just from a scrivener’s perspective, this would be a total mess. If this were to pass the legislature would likely have to pass rehabilitative legislation just to fix all the errors that were created by reversing 116 pages of legislation. 

Next, the question arises, to exactly what do the opponents of this law object? Well, let’s read what Toby Leary of the Civil Rights Coalition has to say in the “Information for Voters” pamphlet:

He says that Chapter 135 is an “unnecessary reinvention” of state firearms law. Before Chapter 135 the Commonwealth already “had some of the strictest gun laws in the country” (which is true). He says that the law is “not about public safety” but is a deeply flawed, 116-page piece of bureaucratic overreach.” He says that it mandates an “expensive, real-time electronic tracking system that the state hasn’t funded and doesn’t know how to build.” It “forces local police departments to enforce a confusing patchwork of vague rules.” The law also required “dozens of clarifications for rules that treat harmless historical re-enactors and antique hobbyists like criminals.”

Well, most of those arguments are just characterizations of things he and his cohort apparently don’t like. None of them are things that (even if true) couldn’t be fixed with small amounts of additional legislation.

No legislation is perfect. However, instead of proposing to just reject all of the many reforms, the opponents of gun reform could have chosen to target what they view as the most problematic part of the reform and amend that. But they did not choose to do so.

And it’s not an argument to say that we should have no gun reform because Massachusetts has the second lowest per capita rate of gun deaths in the nation (after Hawaii). There are still plenty of gun deaths here in the Commonwealth that we shouldn’t try to prevent more.

Still, I understand that gun owners often feel put upon. But gun owners must also register their cars, and that means that (between Chapter 89 and Chapter 90) they are subject to 314 separate sections. And yet, car ownership endures.

Second Amendment Jurisprudence

We also need to acknowledge that despite the Legislature’s best efforts, there are many things about gun ownership (because of Supreme Court decisions) that they cannot regulate or prohibit.

The Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence includes the following three landmark decisions:

1. District of Columbia v. Heller (2008): Established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms for lawful purposes, especially self-defense in the home, independent of militia service.
2. McDonald v. Chicago (2010): Applied that constitutional protection to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment.
3. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022): Established that the right generally extends to carrying firearms in public for self-defense and required governments to justify firearms restrictions by reference to the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

In practical terms, the principal prohibitions and limitations imposed by Supreme Court jurisprudence, then, are these:

So, on balance, the pro-gun population shouldn’t feel too oppressed, because there really are significant things that cannot be prohibited by any state, city or town. And even some private businesses.

This is a Referendum, so be careful how you vote

Finally, I will just note that, because this is a referendum, the way the question works is that it asks whether we want to keep the firearms legislation. So if the answer to that is “yes,” then that is the button you have to fill in at the voting machines.