The frantic email a Massachusetts gun store sent last week says about all you need to know concerning Attorney General Maura Healey’s move Wednesday to close a loophole in the 1998 state law banning the sale of assault-style weapons.
“Today is your LAST DAY to purchase a semiautomatic rifle in Massachusetts,” said the message from the Mass Firearms School, a Natick gun shop.
You may ask: How could that be? Nearly 20 years after the state Legislature halted the sale of these veritable weapons of war, how could people still buy them?
The answer: While the law barred the sale of guns adapted from those designed for battlefield use, including the sale of “copy cat” or “duplicate” versions of such weapons, the law’s language allowed gun manufacturers to categorize them as they saw fit.
That enabled gunmakers to market weapons declared to be “state compliant” based on minor differences in design that did nothing — and this is the unintentional point of the gun shop’s email — to change the ability of these weapons to be fired rapidly and lethally.
In short, gun shops could still put semi-automatic weapons into customers’ hands. And they knew demand existed. On the single day Healey announced her crackdown, in a Boston Globe commentary and in a news conference, gun shops sold more than 2,000 assault-style weapons, nearly a quarter of the total sold in Massachusetts in all of 2015.
The sale of supposedly compliant weapons whose operating systems were no different from banned guns had been conducted for years on the sly — until Healey rightly blew the whistle on it. Last week, after reviewing the state’s assault-weapons ban in the wake of the June 12 massacre in Orlando and other shootings involving these types of weapons, Healey acted decisively to close this loophole. She did so with the support of Gov. Charlie Baker and police officials, knowing her action would be challenged as an affront to gun rights.
The rhetoric ran hot into the weekend, when supporters of the Gun Owners Action League, an affiliate of the National Rifle Association, held protests. A group of lawmakers also cried foul.
One of them, state Sen. Donald Humason, whose district includes Easthampton and Southampton, introduced legislation to remove the attorney general’s “authority to promulgate rules and regulations regarding the sale of firearms in the Commonwealth.” In a
That’s not accurate. What Healey did, as our top state law enforcement official, was root out conduct that exploited a weakness in the 1998 law’s language. Gun manufacturers had found their way around the intent of rules in place for nearly 20 years. After the federal assault-style weapons ban expired in 2004, state law was all that remained to keep weapons designed to kill on a mass scale from being sold here; Healey’s action shows that in practice, the law was not providing the protection people thought it did.
Last Saturday, 58 lawmakers (48 in the House, 10 in the state Senate) signed a letter to Healey criticizing her for imposing what they termed “a whole new law that unfairly infringes on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners in Massachusetts.”
In no way is Healey’s directive a new law. It is her job to see to it that existing laws are followed and that’s what this represents.
Importantly, her action does not make “felons” of ordinary citizens, another angry sound bite from last week. Healey stated up front that no one who had purchased supposedly compliant semi-automatic weapons would be prosecuted. She even extended that protection to the 2,000 people who flooded gun shops last week.
Healey’s critics also fault her for not giving the public or lawmakers advance notice of her plan to close the loophole. Doing so might have helped smooth acceptance of her directive but would have enabled gun shops to push even more of these weapons into our communities.
Given years of wink-wink retailing, gun shops now need, and deserve, clear guidance from the A.G.’s office on precisely which weapons are banned. That list must be clarified as soon as possible and Healey has promised it will be.
In her Globe commentary, Healey cited a duty to protect people from gun violence. “If Washington won’t use its power to get these guns off our streets, we will,” she wrote. “Not only do we have the legal authority to do so, we have a moral obligation to do so.”
Her critics seem to prefer the loophole be enshrined. In their weekend letter to Healey, lawmakers noted that for 18 years the state law “has been implemented and enforced consistently, both by your office and your predecessors.” Actually, the law, because it trusted manufacturers to do the right thing, hadn’t been enforced.
But now the ban has meaning. It is a small but real step forward.