As the majority-Democrat state Senate takes up its version of a bill making long-sought changes to Massachusetts’ gun laws later this week, Bay Staters can expect two big things from that debate.
First up, Democrats will bring the proposal, which looks to crack down on so-called “ghost guns,” among other reforms, to the floor as soon as Thursday armed with some pretty significant support in the form of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association.
The statewide law enforcement group had raised objections over language in a previously approved House bill governing where people could carry weapons. And they come to the table with some heavy-duty clout.
In a statement last week, the police chiefs’ association was unambiguous in its support for the legislation sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Stone Creem, D-Norfolk/Middlesex, saying it was onboard with the “concise firearms reform bill put forth by the Senate.”
Concise is one way of putting it. The bill comes in a full 94 pages shorter than the one the House overwhelmingly approved last fall, according to the politics newsletter MASSterList.
And unlike its House predecessor, it won’t get a public hearing beforehand.
“It’s a completely different bill with a completely different set of concerns,” Jim Wallace, the executive director of the Worcester County-based Gun Owners Action League, told MassLive, as he bemoaned what he described as the lack of transparency accompanying the new proposal.
In a statement, House Democrats said they planned to review the Senate proposal, which comes in the form of an amendment to their already approved bill.
But they also appeared to suggest that it could be in for tough sledding on their side of the State House as they “[kept] in mind the critical nature of the reforms included in the House’s proposal, and the urgency around the issue of gun violence generally,” a spokesperson for House Speaker Ron Mariano, D-3rd Norfolk, said.
Some added context: Both chambers of the Legislature are controlled by the same party. But just like your family’s Thanksgiving table, the relationship occasionally can be fractious.
Second, language in the bill that “prohibits the marketing of unlawful firearm sales to minors,” and exposes violators to civil liability, appears to have emerged as an early sticking point.
In their summary of the bill, Senate Democrats said the language was intended to curtail the gun industry’s “near-absolute immunity” from civil litigation.
If it’s passed by both chambers, and Gov. Maura Healey (also a Democrat) eventually signs it into law, the language would create a “massive liability and lawsuit wormhole for virtually anyone producing products anywhere,” the Gun Owners Action League warned in its analysis of the legislation.
The legislation “opens the doors to civil action against anyone in the 2A [community] or our suppliers of any products if someone feels harmed,” the gun rights group argued in its analysis. “This is an intentional end run around the federal law banning frivolous lawsuits.”
In an email, a Creem spokesperson told MassLive that eight states have “passed far-reaching gun industry accountability laws. Several of those laws — including those in Illinois, Washington, and Hawaii — feature language prohibiting the design, sale, or marketing of firearms to minors.”
Meanwhile, gun violence reform advocates hailed other fixes in the bill and called on lawmakers to approve them.
They include the expansion of “extreme risk protection orders,” commonly referred to as a “red flag law,” which allows the court-ordered seizure of someone’s weapons if it’s shown they pose a danger to themselves or to others; the banning of so-called “Glock Switches,” which illegally turns a semi-automatic handgun into a fully automatic one, according to a published report, and the creation of a new commission charged with studying funding for gun violence prevention services.
All told, an average of 255 people die by guns, and 557 more people are wounded, statewide every year, according to the Massachusetts chapter of the gun violence reduction group Moms Demand Action. Gun violence further costs the state $3.5 billion each year, with taxpayers bearing $85.4 million of that total.
The Senate’s bill “brings us one step closer to enacting these critical gun violence prevention laws in Massachusetts and making our communities even safer,” Mona Hochberg, a Moms Demand volunteer said in a statement.
While the commonwealth already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, legislative authorization of the bill will mean Massachusetts will “remain a national leader in preventing the spread of gun violence,” Hochberg continued.
Lawmakers just have to agree first.
