Massachusetts Democrats are pushing “a raft of new gun laws…in response to last year’s Supreme Court decision overturning some of the state’s strictest firearms licensing laws,” but the head of the state’s Gun Owners Action League (GOAL) says one mandate in particular is not supported by the facts.
According to the Boston Herald, state House Judiciary Committee Co-chair Rep. Michael Day filed H.4420, a bill running more than a hundred pages, which ostensibly “would ban the carrying of firearms in most public places without express permission and aims to fight the rise of so-called ghost guns.” It is dubbed as “An Act Modernizing Firearms Laws.”
GOAL Executive Director Jim Wallace told the newspaper, “The proposed legislation is an abhorrent anti-civil rights effort. No community in Massachusetts faces this kind an intentional bigotry and oppression from the State Government! It is simply a post Bruen tantrum, very similar to Governor Wallace after Brown v. Board of Education.”
Day, meanwhile, referred to the Supreme Court as “rogue” for issuing the Bruen ruling and declared, “One of the most important duties we have as lawmakers is to ensure the health and safety of our residents, and neither a rogue Supreme Court nor increasingly sophisticated criminal activity will stop this Legislature from meeting those duties.”
House Speaker Ron Mariano concurred, asserting, “While the Commonwealth’s gun laws are among the best in the nation, unrelenting acts of violence and the Supreme Court’s deleterious Bruen decision demand legislative action both here in Massachusetts and on the Federal level.”
Now lawmakers are pushing for live fire exercises, which Wallace quickly opposed. In an Op-Ed published on the GOAL website, Wallace stated, “For several years Gun Owners’ Action League (GOAL) has been aware of this proposal. At every opportunity to ask the supporters of the mandate, GOAL has put forth the same question: “What problem exists that this “solution” is supposed to solve.” To date we have never received a logical answer.”
Still, he wrote, “the anti-civil rights crowd wants to add mandatory live fire to the training requirements already in place. Why? Because they say bad things ‘might’ happen without it. The State’s own data does not support any such thing. The supporters keep echoing that we must actually drive a car before we can get a car license. Last we knew, driving was not a civil right.”
This is an argument used by anti-gun Democrats in other states, who—gun owners contend—equate the right to keep and bear arms with a government-regulated privilege.
“It is abundantly clear that the live fire mandate proposal is simply a solution looking for a problem. This is all part of the tantrum we have witnessed in anti-civil rights states after the Bruen decision,” Wallace said.
