The Civil Rights Coalition is leading an initiative to repeal a sweeping gun reform law signed by Gov. Maura Healey as an “emergency preamble” on Oct. 2 to implement H.4885, “An Act Modernizing Firearm Laws.”
This comes in direct response to opposition efforts to gather enough signatures to suspend the law until a 2026 ballot referendum. The Civil Rights Coalition, a state ballot committee comprised of gun rights advocates, would have needed to gather 49,716 signatures to pause the law until 2026.
John Briare, one of the founding members of The Civil Rights Coalition, said the coalition had certified approximately 35,000 signatures with more in the process of being gathered and certified before Healey signed the emergency preamble.
“We were going to cross that 50,000 threshold,” Briare said. “That’s why, all of a sudden, [Healey] declared an ‘emergency,’ which was for the sole purpose of stopping a constitutional process.”
The coalition submitted 95,000 signatures on Oct. 23 calling for the law to appear on the ballot in 2026 to the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office for certification.
The coalition also sent a letter to Healey asking her to voluntarily rescind the emergency preamble and allow the law to be suspended until 2026.
“We did extend an olive branch to the governor,” Briare said. “At 50,000 certified signatures, the law’s supposed to be suspended. Everyone’s supposed to take a deep breath, and then there’s supposed to be an honest public debate about the law.”
If Healey does not suspend the law in response to the letter, Briare said the coalition is prepared to take legal action to seek an injunction on Healey’s use of an emergency preamble.
To gain public support, the coalition is focused on educating the public about guns and the Second Amendment.
“That’s what the next two years is about,” Briare said. “We want to show people how guns actually work.”
Briare opposes the law’s implementation of a centralized database of every gun owner, an expansion of the state’s ban on assault rifles and restrictions on hunting licenses.
The Gun Owners’ Action League, the local state affiliate of the National Rifle Association, has already taken legal action by filing a lawsuit against the law’s training and licensing requirements. GOAL is preparing to file more lawsuits against other aspects of the law, said James Wallace, executive director of GOAL.
“This is actually the greatest attack on civil rights in modern U.S. history,” Wallace said. “They went after everybody in connection with the Second Amendment.”
Ruth Zarkarin, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, an organization that aims to prevent gun violence, said the group is approaching the issue as “a public health crisis that is driven by racial and economic disparity” and is working to strengthen the law’s policies.
“These folks are talking about access to guns as a civil right,” Zarkarin said. “But we believe that people also have a right to not be shot and to be safe from gun violence.”
Michael Siegel, a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine who specializes in gun reform research, said some aspects of Healey’s law will be “very effective,” but others may “interfere too much with the ability of lawful gun owners” to operate their firearms.
Siegel said that rather than repeal the entire law, the Massachusetts legislature should pass amendments to fix specific “problems” with the bill.
For example, the stricter aspects of the law, such as the required registration of all guns in the state, could ultimately be “problematic” for the gun violence protection movement, Siegel said.
“Creating an official gun registry [is] going to make it difficult for other states to pass firearm legislation,” Siegel said. “It allows the gun lobby to point to us and say, ‘Look, they really are trying to prepare to take away our guns.’ It just feeds into the rhetoric of the NRA.”
