NSSF Helping Fund Lawsuit Against Restrictive Massachusetts Gun Law

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) on Monday announced that it has donated $100,000 to Massachusetts Gun Owners’ Action League (GOAL) to support a legal challenge against the new onerous gun control law.

The legislation, which was signed into law by Gov. Maura Healy on July 25, is increasingly coming under siege with at least two lawsuits and an initiative petition being circulated in an attempt to get a statewide vote on repealing the law.

In a press release announcing the donation, NSSF said the law is clearly unconstitutional. Also, as the organization pointed out, the measure was drafted in secret, denying lawmakers the ability to see it beforehand and gun-rights organizations the opportunity to comment on it before the vote.

“Massachusetts is known as a birthplace of the American Revolution, but these lawmakers have turned their backs to rights that belong to the people and instead are instituting an Orwellian state over the citizens of the Commonwealth,” Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel, said in the release. “The fight to protect liberty and individual rights begins anew and we are confident that when federal courts apply scrutiny to this law, it will be relegated to the trash bin where it belongs. Massachusetts lawmakers are failing to defend the rights of the people and instead are kowtowing to the special-interest gun control machine that funds their perpetual re-elections.”

The law, called Chapter 135, makes a number of changes that drastically 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.

Jim Wallace, executive director of GOAL, said the law represents the “greatest attack on civil rights in modern U.S. history.”

“For over a year, the supporters of this law have violated and suspended nearly every rule regarding an open legislative process,” Wallace said. “The final drafting of the bill was done in secret and the final language was not provided to the public, or legislators, until the night before the vote. Clearly the supporters understood the unconstitutional language would never survive the light of day and serious scrutiny. We would like to thank NSSF for helping us fight back against this historic attack on the Bill of Rights.”