Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey used a bit of a trick to make the state's latest gun control measure take effect right away. The reason? She knew that those who opposed the law were working to get it overturned via a ballot initiative.
While I'm sure she figured that most in the state would agree with her, she still figured she needed to do something to teach people who seem to believe their rights matter a lesson.
But if Healey thought opponents of the law would just slink off in defeat, she had another thing coming.
Opponents of the state’s tough new gun control law say they’ve cleared a major hurdle in a push to repeal the new restrictions, which they argue will hurt businesses, cost jobs and deprive people of their constitutional rights.
The Civil Rights Coalition, a coalition of gun owners and businesses that’s behind efforts to repeal the law, said Tuesday that it has collected 90,000 signatures to put the issue before the state’s voters in the 2026 elections, ahead of a Wednesday deadline to submit them to the Secretary of State’s office.
A law signed by Democratic Gov. Maura Healey in July expanded the state’s bans on “assault” weapons and high-capacity magazines, outlawed so-called “ghost” guns and set new restrictions on the open carry of firearms, among other provisions. Lawmakers approved the bill in response to concerns about mass shootings and gun violence.
But critics of the new restrictions say they are unconstitutional and argue the changes will do little to reduce gun violence in the state, which already has one of the lowest rates of firearm deaths in the nation.
“This law is aimed at harming lawful, peaceful citizens,” Cape Cod Gun Works owner Toby Leary, the group’s chairman, said Tuesday at a Statehouse briefing. “It wasn’t to reduce crime, or get guns off the streets or lock violent felons up. This was purely political.”
Leary said proponents of the ballot question are seeking to block the law from going into effect while they pursued the ballot question, but that effort may have been blocked by Healey who last week signed an executive order adding an emergency preamble to the law, putting its provisions into effect immediately.
The repeal effort is one of several seeking to block the law. The Massachusetts Gun Owners’ Action League, which is affiliated with the National Rifle Association, filed a federal lawsuit in August seeking to overturn the new law’s training and licensing requirements.
Of course the law is aimed at harming lawful, peaceful citizens. That's who is impacted by all gun control laws.
If I'm feeling charitable at any given moment, I might concede that they also allow states to punish people who carry guns illegally, but Massachusetts already has more than enough laws on the books to do that, so there's even less reason than normal to feel charitable toward the state.
The effort to overturn the law via a ballot initiative is one key part of what we're seeing as a way to deal with stuff like this, but it's far from the totality.
It seems the NRA is also planning to challenge the law in court, and that's not the only lawsuit in the works.
In other words, all the stops are being pulled out for this one, which is a good thing.
Healey's efforts here are nothing more than a blatant attempt to annihilate the rights of law-abiding citizens in the state and that's not supposed to happen. Not in a nation that was founded on the idea that free men and women have rights and that not even the state can trample on those rights, Not without due process of law, at least.