loading . . . Massachusetts Deserves Better than Gun Control Lip Service: Or, âweâve tried nothing and weâre all out of ideasâ.
On December 24, 2022, after a lot of waffling, I called up a friend and asked if heâd be willing to give me a ride to buy myself a handgun. I grew up in a family with a history of military service on one side and hunting on the other, and I got both my rifle and shotgun shooting merit badges in Boy Scouts. Even after moving to Massachusetts Iâd occasionally go up to New Hampshire or Maine to shoot with friends, so itâs not like I was completely unfamiliar with guns. But this was different.
For some background, in 2019, after agreeing to speak to Vice at the protest against Bostonâs Straight Pride Parade, I started getting some negative attention online from nazis. I wasnât doing much, at the time, to hide who I was online, and Iâve been told I have a pretty distinctive look. It was pretty easy to find me on social media.
It started small, relatively speaking. Occasional, immediately reported and removed, comments on my public Facebook or Twitter posts calling me one homophobic slur or another (remember when reporting hate speech actually did something?). Then, while I was in the middle of a job search in 2021, it escalated to vague threats of violence, or more explicit threats to share my social media posts with potential employers. I hadnât said anything I was ashamed of, my Twitter was still public, and I figured none of them had the spine to actually do anything so I brushed it off. Then, in February of 2022, I received an expiring photo, on Grindr, of the front door of my apartment building, with the message âfound you, commie f*****â.
Until that point, Iâd never considered getting my license to carry. Gun laws in Massachusetts seemed complicated and confusing, even for a law school graduate. And given my past interactions with Boston PD (Straight Pride was hardly my first protest) and the fact that they had the discretion to decide whether or not I could actually get my license, it just didnât seem worth it to spend the money only to possibly get denied or receive a restricted, âClass Bâ, license. Suddenly, though, there was something much weightier balancing out the potential inconvenience.
I tell this story to drive home that even before the passage of Chapter 135 of the Acts of 2024, An Act Modernizing Firearm Laws, the legal framework for gun ownership in Massachusetts was so poorly constructed that it took a death threat for me to decide to tackle it. Even with that motivation, I nearly gave up halfway through. With how much ambiguity chapter 135 introduced, and how poorly it has been implemented, Iâm not sure Iâd be willing to tackle the process from scratch today.
The popular narrative in support of Chapter 135, and opposed to the referendum petition to repeal the law, is that Chapter 135 is, to quote Governor Healey, âthe most significant gun safety legislation in a decade.â She went on to say that the new law âinvests in our communities to address the root causes of violence[,]â which I will admit, having read the law quite a few times now, is a claim I find dubious at best. While it does create a matching program for federal violence prevention funds, and a pair of legislative commissions âone to study how violence prevention funds are spent, the other to review the availability of federal funds and how they can be spentâ the law is rather light on details about addressing root causes.
So what does the new law actually do? Quite a lot, actually, though topping that list is âfrustrates meâ. I had a (very) brief stint at the state house while I was in law school, and Iâd spent quite a bit of time in those halls as an advocate, making a nuisance of myself to various legislators there on one issue or another, for years before that. Reviewing this bill, and hearing others talk about it as if its the result of grand conspiracy rather than just another manifestation of the profound dysfunction of our statehouse, is exhausting. From our âaward winningâ website, which somehow, in the year 2025, still lacks the option to view an archive of the previous text of sections and for some reason does not contain line numbers anywhere, despite many bills referencing line numbers for their edits, to the apparent fatal allergy to using redline documents to indicate what changes go where, making it next to impossible to decipher what has actually happened while we wait, sometimes up to a year, for a new law to be codified, the legislature seems as determined as ever to be as opaque as possible. Despite what some of the more paranoid second amendment aficionados might believe, this is not a targeted attack on them; it is just routine incompetence.
What it does not do, so far as I can tell, is make anyone safer in any truly meaningful way. It does give the game away by admitting that âassault weaponâ was a bogus categorization, and that it was about aesthetics all along with âassault-style firearmâ being the hip new term to use. It does demonstrate a dizzying failure to engage any kind of actual subject matter expert, or even someone with at least a baseline understanding of firearms, to assist with drafting. And it does leave Massachusetts gun owners and prospective gun owners scratching their heads about what is and is not legal at this point.
Take, for example Chapter 140, § 131M, subsection (b). Previously, 131M had established what was commonly referred to as the âpre-banâ date of September 13, 1994. Any firearm that met the definition of an âassault weaponâ that was possessed on or before that date was excluded from enforcement of the penalties for violation of the assault weapons ban, and, per popular wisdom, could be âfully featuredâ. The new § 131M(b) contains a similar provision, but one that has managed to cause quite a bit of confusion. To paraphrase, it states that if something that would otherwise now qualify as an assault-style firearm was legally owned in the state on or before August 1, 2024, it is excluded from the restriction on possession, ownership, sale, or transfer. Some claim that any rifle that conformed with the prior assault weapons ban, owned prior to August 2, 2024, is now a âpre-banâ and can similarly be fully featured. Others are quietly waiting for the former group to be a test case in the courts.
This is, of course, not the only source of confusion. The law requires, in Chapter 140 § 131 3/4 (fractional sections being just another of Beacon Hillâs infuriating little quirks) that the secretary of public safety, with the advice of the Firearms Control Advisory Board (FCAB), publish a roster of firearms approved for sale (interestingly, neither § 131 3/4 or § 131 1/2 appear to have been updated yet with the new language from the Acts 2024 ch. 135). Unfortunately, presumably much to the embarrassment of all involved, FCAB punted. Using quite a novel interpretation of the law, they determined that even though the legislature had very clearly and explicitly said âfirearmsâ, a term that encompasses rifles, shotguns, and pistols alike, in fact the legislature did not mean ârifles and shotgunsâ because the safety testing required for a firearm to be included on the roster is impossible to conduct on rifles and shotguns.
On the list of incomprehensible additions is the requirement in 140 § 123(h) that any sale of ammunition include recording the âsex, residence address and occupationâ of the purchaser, seemingly intended either to discourage people from purchasing ammunition or make it inordinately cumbersome for retailers to offer it for sale. This, naturally, has the effect of driving Massachusetts gun owners to purchase ammunition from out of state. If the goal was to harm Massachusetts businesses, well done I suppose, but Iâm hard pressed to say that it does anything to make anyone safer.
What, then, about the required firearms registry established by 140 § 121B? Setting aside that there is little to no evidence to support the common argument that a registry makes it easier to solve crimes (it turns out that if someone is planning to commit a crime with a gun, or buy one illegally, bypassing the registry is actually pretty easy), the state has already proven itself an untrustworthy steward of gun ownersâ data. In 2023, the state released data on firearms transactions dating back to 2004, both private transactions and retail purchases. In apparent violation of state law, the data included unique ID numbers for each purchaser, as well as the expiration date of their licenses, which is the birthday of the license holder. While that data has, since, been edited to remove the identifying information, it does not instill much confidence.
For a final point on the matter of a registry, when ICE raided a South Shore apartment complex in Chicago in September of last year, they apparently had assistance from Illinoisâ firearm registry. Maps of the complex included some apartments marked as âfirearmâ. Suffice to say, as fascist violence escalates nationwide with each passing day, and citizens are gunned down in the streets by secret police, I anticipate that Massachusetts residents reconsidering their anti-gun stance would not welcome ICE having access to their information in the registry.
A particular victory that Governor Healey and other proponents of the law tout is the âbanâ on 3D printed firearms they claim is contained in the amendments. As you might have guessed, this is not exactly an accurate representation of the facts. Chapter 140 § 121D is where the âbanâ is located, but an astute reader might note the important qualifying language contained in the very first subsection: âwithout a valid license to carry firearmsâ. It feels important to note at this juncture that it is already illegal for a person to possess a firearm without a license. This is not a ban, itâs not even something new. Itâs just an additional charge on top of behavior that is already illegal. Just more investment in a carceral approach to a social problem.
I want to say, very clearly, that I am no stranger to gun violence. It is not abstract or a hypothetical for me, I have experienced it firsthand. My brother and I were both, on separate occasions, held up at gunpoint as teenagers. More of my friends than I can count were shot, or at least shot at, at some point while I was growing up. More than a handful of those at the hands of the police. Most survived, some did not.
But, before law school, I was a criminologist by education, and consequentially a reluctant statistician. My personal experience with gun violence notwithstanding, what does the data say about it? According to the Pew Research Center, in 2023 roughly 38% of gun deaths were murder, while 58% were suicides. Iâll focus on the former for now, and come back to the latter in a bit. That 38% (17,927) represents 79% of all murders, nationwide. But what about Massachusetts? According to the Center for Gun Violence Solutions, in 2023, 44% (121) of all gun deaths in Massachusetts were murders.
But there is also the note that Massachusetts had the lowest gun death rate in the country in 2023. In fact, from what I can find, Massachusetts has had the lowest gun death rate in the country for at least the last four years. In spite of that, Massachusetts ranks fifth, as of 2024, for strictest gun laws in the country, behind California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, each of which has consistently had higher gun death rates than Massachusetts (Californiaâs was nearly triple Massachusettsâ in 2021).
What about the other end of the spectrum then? New Hampshire, our live free or die neighbor, ranks 28 on the list and, rather famously, has very few restrictions at all on gun ownership. In 2024, New Hampshireâs gun death rate was 9.6 per hundred thousand, compared to rank one, California, with 8. In 2021, California actually surpassed New Hampshire, with 9 compared to 8.3. This incongruity continues as we move down the list, with rank 50, Wyoming, having a gun death rate of 21.5, while New Mexico, at rank 19, has a rate of 25.3.
Looking further into the state data, in 2023, of New Hampshireâs 143 gun deaths, only 14 (9.7%) were murders, while 122 were suicides. Meanwhile, in California, of the 3,209 gun deaths in 2023, 1427 (44%) were murders, while 1647 were suicides. In Wyoming, 130 gun deaths, 10 (7.6%) murders, 116 suicides. New Mexico, 530 gun deaths, 218 (41%) murders, 284 suicides. Something is not adding up. It seems clear that not only is the strictness of gun laws not the definitive factor in predicting the rate of gun deaths, but also not in predicting murder vs. suicide. There must be other factors.
The truth is, we know exactly what causes violence, and what solves it. A society that routinely produces people eager to cause harm is not that way because it has tools available that facilitate that harm. Guns do not make people killers any more than pressure cookers, kitchen knives, or cars do. A broken society âwhere, in the richest country on Earth, people can starve to death, be left without a home, or be denied lifesaving care by a soulless ghoul focused only on profitâ does. We have known this for decades.
There are other societies in the world where guns are readily available and a part of the culture. They do not experience the level of violence we do here, not because we have more guns, but because those societies are significantly better about taking care of people. Again, we have known this for decades, but for some reason have chosen to do nothing about it.
How long, exactly, has single-payer healthcare been considered in Massachusetts? How many times has the state legislature punted on it? What about rent control? Overdose prevention sites? How about an easy one? Surely the Massachusetts legislature would have prioritized eliminating something as obviously horrific as child marriage, right? That had to have been banned long ago. Right? Right?
What about what they have prioritized? Sports betting? Check. Refusing to go on record voting to kill a transphobic budget amendment? Check. Rolling back climate goals? Well, they might still be working on that. A âgun safetyâ bill that doesnât actually make anyone safer? Check. Thereâs a pattern here, even in this very short list.
The fact of the matter is that ch. 135 is a stick in our eye, not the panacea it was sold as. Repeal would send a message to a legislature that has abdicated its duty to improve the lives of Massachusetts residents. We deserve better than lip service. We deserve real solutions to our problems, not a continued reliance on the unjust carceral strategies that brought us to this place to begin with. Itâs not about the guns, not really. Itâs about holding the legislatureâs feet to the fire. Itâs about demanding more from people who seem to have forgotten that their position is one of service, not power. http://dlvr.it/TQYXZW
