Massachusetts gun regulations will go before voters in November

A question on Massachusetts’ November ballot seeks to repeal a 2024 law passed by the Legislature described as the state’s “most significant gun safety legislation in a decade.”  

Gun violence prevention activists praise the law for modernizing firearm regulations and adding several new guardrails on gun ownership. Pro-gun advocates, who collected petition signatures to place it on the ballot, say the law violates their Second Amendment rights and only targets lawful gun owners. 

Unlike the initiative petitions that may crowd the state’s November ballot, this question is a veto referendum on an existing law. A ‘no’ vote would repeal the law, while a ‘yes’ vote would uphold it. 

What changed under Chapter 135?

The new gun law, officially known as Chapter 135, was passed 124-33 by the House and 35-5 by the Senate, and Gov. Maura Healey signed it into law in July 2024. Healey signed an emergency preamble in October 2024, preventing opponents’ initial efforts to suspend the law. 

The law enacted a wide range of changes to Massachusetts’ existing firearm laws, which were already among the strongest in the country. It prohibited firearms in schools, government buildings and polling locations, with certain exceptions. 

Parts of Chapter 135 were a response to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, which ruled that Americans have the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. The high court overturned a New York law requiring applicants to demonstrate a need to obtain a concealed-carry license. 

After the Bruen decision, Massachusetts police were no longer allowed to deny a license to carry because the applicant lacked “a sufficiently good reason” to own a gun.

The legislation changed firearms licensing requirements, allowing police to access applicants’ relevant mental health history and to deny a license if they have “reliable, articulable and credible” information that the applicant is a risk to themselves or others. It also expanded the state’s red flag law, allowing school administrators and health care providers to petition a court for an extreme risk protection order requiring a person to surrender their license and guns if they are deemed a danger. 

New Bedford Police Chief Jason Thody said these two measures were a positive change.

“Some people may see that as an overreach or intrusive, but it has always been a concern of mine that we’re trying to make a determination as to whether someone is suitable to have a firearm on, largely, a paper-based background investigation,” Thody said.

The law criminalized ghost guns — privately made firearms that do not have serial numbers and are untraceable. It also expanded enforcement against machine guns and silencers, including prohibiting devices such as Glock switches and auto sears, which can modify a legal firearm into a fully automatic weapon. 

According to Thody, ghost guns and modifiers are not prevalent in New Bedford. Still, he said the regulation is important because they make firearms “much more dangerous.”

Rep. Christopher Markey, D-Dartmouth, said prohibiting ghost guns is “paramount,” but raised concerns about the administrative burdens that the law places on gun dealers. Markey did not cast a vote when the bill was in the House. 

Under Chapter 135, dealers are required to confiscate and report expired or suspended licenses. They also must keep a record of all firearm and ammunition transactions that police can access at any time. 

“I understand that someone has to do it, but I just think the complexities of [the law] can result in the businesses being overburdened and then not surviving,” Markey said.

Despite finding some parts of Chapter 135 problematic, Markey said he does not support repealing the entire law.

Under Chapter 135, “assault weapon” was redefined as “assault-style firearm,” encompassing known assault weapons and ones with similar functions. The law prohibits possessing or transferring assault-style firearms and large-capacity feeding devices, though some previously-owned firearms are grandfathered in. It also banned people under 21 from owning semiautomatic rifles or shotguns. 

Thody listed this provision as his only real concern with the law, because it did not include a carveout for law enforcement recruits who use assault rifles and high-capacity magazines during training. Despite this inconvenience, Thody said if the law keeps people safe, then “the juice is worth the squeeze.”

The state expanded the Basic Firearms Safety course requirements to include safe storage, suicide-prevention education and disengagement tactics. The new training requirements went into effect on April 2, but gun advocates took issue with the implementation process. 

The course now also includes live fire training — a measure that Rep. Christopher Hendricks, D-New Bedford, said he advocated for. Hendricks was on the Legislature’s Committee on the Judiciary when the bill moved through the House. He helped craft the original version and voted for the final version. 

“I think there was a lot of misinformation [about the law] … that it was going to be all these unconstitutional infractions for gun owners, which is just nonsense,” Hendricks said. 

Rep. Steven Ouellette, D-Westport, did not grant an interview. Rep. Mark Sylvia, D-Fairhaven, as well as Rep. Antonio F.D. Cabral and Sen. Mark Montigny, D-New Bedford, did not respond to requests for comment. 

Cabral and Montigny voted in favor of Chapter 135. Ouellette and Sylvia were not in the Legislature in 2024. 

Before coming to New Bedford, Thody was a chief in Connecticut. There, he saw similar regulations — particularly those targeting ghost guns and manipulated firearms — improve public safety. 

But Connecticut’s law went one step further, designating repeat offenders who possess large-capacity magazines or manipulated or removed serial numbers as “serious firearm offenders” who face stricter release conditions. Thody said this measure was “very effective” and suggested that Massachusetts consider a similar policy. 

“What are we really doing with folks that are violating these well-intended laws?” Thody said. “If the answer is just we’re treating them the same way, and there are not any accelerated or increased consequences, I think our ability to see positive results goes down.”

The ‘no’ vote 

Toby Leary — co-founder of Cape Gun Works in Hyannis — “fell in love” with shooting sports as a 12-year-old Boy Scout. His hobby grew into a passion, and on his 18th birthday, he applied for his license to carry. Leary said he immediately recognized that there was something “very wrong” with the system.

“I like how America was founded and operated for the first 175, even 200 years,” Leary said. “If you weren’t a prohibited person, you could order a gun through the mail, and it would come to your house.”

Leary has been spearheading a campaign against Chapter 135 as chair of The Civil Rights Coalition, which he described as a bipartisan ballot committee. The law has already faced several legal challenges, but Leary is now taking the fight to the ballot because the courts are “hostile to [the] cause.” 

Campaign finance records show that The Civil Rights Coalition raised $280,506 as of Jan. 1. The largest contributions came from firearm manufacturer Smith & Wesson and the Gun Owners’ Action League. 

The executive director of the Gun Owners’ Action League, Jim Wallace, described Chapter 135 as “the worst attack on civil rights in modern U.S. history.” 

Leary and Wallace both said that the law has done nothing to prevent gun violence. Wallace also argued the term “gun violence” is a misnomer, saying people, not guns, commit crimes.

“It’s kind of like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it harder for sober drivers to buy cars,” Leary said. “It’s not going to work. I think any intelligent, rational-thinking person would agree with that.”

Wallace told The Light that gun-related homicides have “more than doubled” in the decades since the Massachusetts Gun Control Act of 1998 was passed. He pointed to the state’s injury fatality reports, which show that 63 people were killed with a gun in 1998, compared with 121 in 2023.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is largely consistent with state injury fatality reports, show a different pattern when accounting for population size. Between 1996 and 2024, gun-related homicide rates in Massachusetts fluctuated between 1.0 and 1.9 per 100,000 residents, with no long-term trend, but notable peaks in 2010–11 and 2020. The rate was 1.0 in 1998 and 1.3 in 2024.

Asked by The Light to name the most troubling provisions of Chapter 135, Wallace and Leary both responded with general complaints about the regulation and its effect on lawful gun owners. 

The ‘yes’ vote 

Ruth Zakarin’s twin children turned 16 on Feb. 14, 2018 — the same day a shooter killed 17 people at his former high school in Parkland, Florida. 

“That was a real moment for me,” Zakarin said. “[My children] are the first generation to deal with active shooter drills. That’s just not what I want for our young people. It’s not what I want for my kids, not what I want for anyone else’s kids.”

Zakarin joined the gun violence prevention field about seven years ago after working for years with survivors of domestic and sexual violence. She is now the CEO of the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence and is fighting to uphold Chapter 135 as chair of the Yes For a Safe Massachusetts ballot committee. 

“[Repealing the law] would move us backward. We want to move the work of protecting our communities and our children from gun violence forward,” Zakarin said. “The only way we can do that is if we protect the strong foundation that we have already built in the commonwealth when it comes to our gun safety laws.”

She argued that Chapter 135 did nothing to restrict legal gun ownership.

Rev. David Lima, executive minister with the Inter-Church Council of Greater New Bedford, echoed Zakarin’s sentiment, calling the regulations “common sense” and saying they help prevent violence and suicides. The Inter-Church Council of Greater New Bedford is a member organization of the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence.

“You’re not walking down the street with an AR-15 to protect yourself. You’re walking down the street with an AR-15 to intimidate or to cause disruption, and to do something that’s not exactly legal,” Lima said.

He added that lawful gun owners don’t need guns without serial numbers and hunters don’t need assault-type weapons. (Some hunters do use semiautomatic rifles.)

No matter what voters decide, Zakarin said the fight to prevent gun violence will continue well beyond Election Day. 

“Our work is always to enact policies that we know work to keep people safe, and to push the state to invest robustly in the community-based programs that are doing the work every day to not just prevent violence, but promote peace,” she said. 

Jamie Perkins is a graduate student in journalism covering state government for The Light as part of the Boston University Statehouse Program. Email them at jperkins@newbedfordlight.org.