Release:

In 2022 the Supreme Court of the United States issued its ruling in Bruen that declared New York’s firearm “suitability” licensing process to be unconstitutional. The suitability method allowed licensing officials to restrict or deny firearm licenses based purely on opinion or conjecture. This is how the contentious Massachusetts system has worked for decades.

In a tantrum, the Massachusetts legislature immediately began a campaign of deceit and destruction.

Only a month after the historic civil rights ruling, Speaker of the House, Ron Mariano, hid an amendment into a very popular technology bill. (Now Section 11 of Ch. 175 of the Acts of 2022.) Rather than complying with the ruling of the high court, the House leadership attempted to sidestep it by “codifying” a suitability standard. The new law now reads:

[Licensing official may deny a firearm license for] “…reliable, articulable and credible information that the applicant or licensee has exhibited or engaged in behavior that suggests that, if issued a license, the applicant or licensee may create a risk to public safety or a risk of danger to self or others.”

Interestingly enough, this move would suggest that licensing authorities had been denying licenses for reasons that were not “reliable, articulable and credible”.

Only a month after the legislature started a brand-new session in 2023, Speaker Mariano instructed his Chair of the Judiciary Committee, Michael Day, to conduct a top-down review of the Commonwealth’s gun laws. Rather than being a move to comply with Bruen, the effort was to make the State’s laws Bruen proof.

What ensued over the following year was an inexplicable and unprecedented series of political maneuvers. Virtually every procedural rule was suspended, or even reinvented, to push forward what can only be described as the worst anti-civil rights bill in modern Massachusetts history,  CHAPTER 135 of THE ACTS of 2024 - An Act Modernizing Firearm Laws

Whether you support the Second Amendment or not, no one should standby and allow our legislature to operate in such a manner. Because next time it could be your civil rights on the line.