Just a few weeks after its passage, gun owners in Massachusetts are already pushing back against the punitive gun control legislation signed into law by Gov. Maura Healey on July 25.

The Gun Owners’ Action League (GOAL) has taken the first step to get enough signatures on a petition to put a measure to repeal the new law on the ballot. Unfortunately, it will be 2026 before citizens can vote on the proposal if all requirements are met to put the matter to a statewide vote.

“We started the process in filing a referendum petition to repeal the law,” GOAL Executive Director Jim Wallace told the State House News Service. “This is a flat-out ban on the Second Amendment regardless of what they tell people. Regardless of what you feel about guns, the law as it stands is unenforceable.”

According to Wallace, GOAL won’t be heading up the referendum effort, rather a special campaign committee will do that.

The sweeping 116-page anti-gun measure, H. 4885, makes already restrictive Massachusetts even more unfriendly for lawful gun ownership. In fact, the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) called the measure “radical” and one of the “most extreme gun control bills in the country.”

The measure makes a number of changes that will affect gun owners. It raises the age to own a semi-automatic rifle or shotgun to 21 years old, expands definitions for modifications and parts that convert a semi-auto into a full-auto firearm and bans them, prohibits so-called “ghost guns” and also expends the list of places where carrying a firearm is banned to include government buildings, polling places and schools.

The law also adds more firearms to the commonwealth’s banned list of so-called “assault weapons,” makes the state’s “red-flag” law even more unconstitutional enabling more categories of people to report gun owners, requires standardized safety training, including a live fire component, for all firearm license applicants, establishes a worthless commission to study the funding structure for violence prevention services and establishes an equally worthless commission to study the status, feasibility and utility of smart guns and microstamping.

The petition seeks to not only repeal the law, but also to suspend enforcement of the law until the referendum can appear on a statewide ballot.  

The new law is also already the target of at least two lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. Nearly before the ink had dried on Healy’s signature, the National Rifle Association was already planning a lawsuit  to overturn the gross overreach infringing upon Massachusetts gun owners’ Second Amendment rights. GOAL has already filed a lawsuit challenging the law’s new licensing regimes for firearm identification cards and licenses to carry.

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14 COMMENTS

  1. I’m sorry for the more conservative residents of the slave state of Massachusetts. But most of the people around, you are comfortable with being a slave.

    In the 21st slavery is very different from what is described in the history books. The masters give you “free stuff.”

    And the slaves are very happy. They were very happy, to vote for an out of the closet white f.as.cist lesbi@n.

      • It is astonishing to me just how much 100 to 150 year old science fiction has come true. Even what Aristotle wrote about almost two thousand five hundred years ago.

        I understand why the left wants everyone to stop reading about these old dead white men.

        Who gave us these warnings so long ago.

    • We all saw this coming a year in advance, knowing full well it would pass on partisan lines, and would be gleefully signed by our governor.

      I’m guessing with the advance warning, true potg made the appropriate purchases beforehand and will now, quietly, not comply with any of this abomination which apparently passes for duly enacted, constitutionally appropriate law.

  2. I had the great displeasure of living in Massachusetts for exactly one year. I didn’t bother attempting to get state permission to own items the federal government already said I could own. this new law is egregious, but so are all of the other preexisting laws Massachusetts has. Sadly the state is full of people who get their bread and circuses and don’t worry about what they are giving up. The statistically speaking handful of free thinking individuals are so outnumbered at the polls, that their votes effectively don’t matter.

    • Yes we are and no they don’t. Still, I’ve been here 57 years and love the place geographically. Its beautiful. I’ve successfully countered my kids’ public school indoctrination, and they’ve turned out just fine.

      My homes and businesses are here and I have no intention of leaving. Claire Wolf’s works on civil disobedience comes to mind, and I do what I want.

  3. California passed a law mandating microstamping, and Kamala, then the AG, swore under penalty of perjury that the technology was readily available, thus triggering a requirement for any gun to be added to the Roster of handguns that could be sold in the State to be so equipped. She lied. Ultimately, the current AG abandoned a defense of the law. New Jersey also passed a law, and then studied the feasibility. It wasn’t. Now Massachusetts will do the same thing all over again at taxpayer expense and come to the same conclusion: the technology for microstamping does not exist that reliably stamps a code on each fired case.

    • “California passed a law mandating microstamping….”

      And a challenge went to the state supreme court (highest court). The Cali Supreme Court ruled that even though a law is impossible to fulfill, such a law remains a valid (enforceable) law.

  6. I have a cousin who owns a home is Sharon, MA (a suburb of Boston) who bought a summer house in NH a couple of years ago. It didn’t take long before he changed his residency to NH because of this kind of bullshit.

    • What was the challenge?
      As long as he/they/it moved all paperwork (license, registration, etc.) to the NH address they would be residents of NH.

      Now taxes and other (illegal) issues would need to be determined by the tax laws.

  8. “California passed a law mandating microstamping….”

    And a challenge went to the state supreme court (highest court). The Cali Supreme Court ruled that even though a law is impossible to fulfill, such a law remains a valid (enforceable) law.

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