Activists press Mass. lawmakers on bills to tighten gun laws

Activists on both sides of the gun debate testified at the Massachusetts Statehouse on Tuesday as lawmakers work to hammer out a final package of proposed changes to the state’s firearms laws.

One of the bills would ban “ghost guns," which typically guns that lack serial numbers, are largely untraceable and can be constructed at home, sometimes with the use of 3D printers.

Other proposals would tighten the state's ban on certain semiautomatic weapons such as AR- and AK-style guns and clarify places where carrying a firearm is prohibited — like schools, polling places and government buildings.

Ilyse Levine-Kanji, a member of the group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told lawmakers many of the proposals make common sense.

She recalled a shooting at a San Francisco law office in 1993 that led to the deaths of eight people, including two co-workers who were shot through a glass wall. She said she would have been in the office if she hadn’t been on vacation that day.

“The shooting devastated me. I started having panic attacks, feeling like skyscrapers were going to fall on top of me whenever I walked down the street,” Levine-Kanji said. “To this day, 30 years later, I feel uncomfortable sitting with my back to a window.”

Ellen Leigh, also of Moms Demand Action, urged lawmakers to tighten gun laws, recalling a incident in which she said her life was threatened by someone with a gun.

“I will never forget the moments when my attacker shouted, ‘Shoot her! Shoot her!' I closed my eyes terrified, waiting for the gun to go off,” she said. The attack ended when a passerby shouted that he had called the police, she said.

Opponents of many of the proposed changes say they unfairly target law-abiding gun owners.

“I'm really concerned that we have become the threat, the lawful gunowners," said Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners’ Action League. “It was all about how we would commit harm or we would intimidate somebody. When has that ever happened? Rather than deal with the criminal element, they're trying to make us into the bad guys."

Last month, the Massachusetts House approved a sweeping gun bill aimed at tightening firearm laws, cracking down on “ghost guns” and strengthening the state’s ban on certain weapons. The Senate has yet to approve its own gun bill.

The House bill would also prohibit individuals from carrying a gun into a person’s home without their permission and require key gun components be serialized and registered with the state. It would also ban carrying firearms in schools, polling places and government buildings.

The bill is in part a response to a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that U.S. citizens have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.

Earlier this month, Massachusetts Democratic Attorney General Andrea Campbell announced a gun violence prevention unit dedicated in part to defending the state's existing gun laws from legal challenge.

Even though the state has the lowest rate of gun violence in the nation, in an average year, 255 people die and 557 are wounded by guns in Massachusetts. The violence disproportionately impacts Black youth who are more than eight times as likely to die by gun violence than their white peers, Campbell said.