JULY 18, 2024
Today Representative Connolly joined with his Cambridge and Somerville colleagues in the House to cast the final vote necessary to send sweeping gun reform legislation to the Governor’s desk. The provisions of the final bill cover a wide range of topics including ghost guns, firearm licensing, dealer inspections, protected areas, updates to the red flag law, and more.
This bill is the culmination of a multi-year process that began when the Supreme Court issued the disastrous Bruen decision in June of 2022. This ruling meant lawmakers needed to rewrite many of our gun safety laws to be in compliance. Shortly thereafter the House, under the leadership of Judiciary Chair Mike Day, led a series of listening sessions. Rep. Connolly participated in the seventh of such sessions in May 2023 at Framingham State University. There he heard from law enforcement, school administrators and teachers as well as the general public about the impacts of firearms and gun safety on each of these constituencies. He also shared with Chair Day and the attendees our Cambridge and Somerville community’s struggles with ongoing gun violence.
After a public hearing and a series of continued deliberations, the House debated and passed their version of the bill in October of 2023. And a few months later the Senate passed their version in February. Finally a conference committee with three members from both chambers was appointed to reconcile the differences between both bills, which produced the final compromise before the Legislature today.
Read on for a summary of the key provisions in the bill.
Stemming Illegal Firearm Flow. This bill provides tools for law enforcement to target illegal gun trafficking by including an enhanced tracing system to track firearms used in crimes, modernizing the existing firearm registration system, and increasing the availability of firearm data for academic and policy use. The bill also enhances requirements for reporting lost, stolen and surrendered firearms.
Protecting Communities from Gun Violence. The legislation criminalizes discharging firearms at or near dwellings. It also prohibits the carrying of firearms on school busses, polling places, and government buildings with an exemption for law enforcement.
Additionally, the bill standardizes training requirements for individuals seeking a license to carry and will now require live firearm training. The bill also expands the list of who may petition a court for an extreme risk protection order (ERPO) against a person who poses a risk of causing bodily injury to themselves or others beyond just household members and law enforcement, to include school administrators and medical professionals. It creates a special legislative commission to study and make recommendations to improve the Commonwealth’s funding structure for violence prevention services and begins the process of directing the Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services to seek federal reimbursement for violence prevention programs.
Modernizing Massachusetts Firearm Laws. The bill ensures that Massachusetts laws remain in compliance with the Bruen decision and provides standardization to our laws and the process of obtaining a license to carry a firearm for responsible individuals. The legislation also updates how we define assault-style firearms and places new restrictions on large capacity feeding devices that are currently owned. It closes loopholes that allow the modification of legal firearms into illegal automatic weapons and provides a legacy clause so all firearms legally owned and registered in Massachusetts as of the effective date of the bill will continue to be legal and may be bought and sold within the state.
Between 2019 to 2021, the Boston Police Department alone saw a 280 percent increase in the number of untraceable ghost guns it recovered on the streets. The bill passed today tackles this rise in untraceable guns by requiring the registration and serialization of frames and receivers and updates our definition of firearm to include unfinished frames and receivers.
Now that the House and Senate have enacted the final conferenced version of the bill, the Governor has ten days to sign the bill, send it back with amendments, or veto.
