Question 9 asks Massachusetts voters whether to uphold a 2024 law that created one of the country’s few statewide gun registries, a system that already reaches further than California’s.
Massachusetts gun owners have until Wednesday to register every firearm they own with the state and to make sure each one carries a serial number. Six days later, on Nov. 3, voters will decide whether the law that imposed that requirement should stay on the books.
The vote, Question 9, is a referendum on Chapter 135 of the Acts of 2024, which Gov. Maura Healey signed on July 25, 2024. A “yes” vote keeps the law. A “no” vote repeals it.
The sequence has angered the law’s opponents. “It’s a total violation of people’s rights to require this before they have their chance to vote on it,” Toby Leary, a gun shop owner and chair of The Civil Rights Coalition, which is leading the repeal effort, told The Associated Press.
Why the law is already in force
A referendum petition normally suspends a law until voters weigh in. This one did not, because on Oct. 2, 2024, Ms. Healey attached an emergency preamble that put the law into effect immediately, two years before the vote, as South Shore News laid out in a detailed timeline.
The law passed the Democratic-led Legislature by wide margins, 124 to 33 in the House and 35 to 5 in the Senate, numbers printed in the ballot question itself. Opponents then gathered signatures, and Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin certified 78,707 valid ones, more than double the 37,287 required but too late for the 2024 ballot.
The deadline itself took most of a year to settle. For months, state web pages and guidance gave conflicting dates, and the compliance date ultimately moved 26 days, from Oct. 2 to Oct. 28, South Shore News reported.
A repeal would not undo the deadline retroactively. Under the state constitution, a law left in force while a referendum is pending is “repealed” 30 days after a “no” vote, not treated as though it never existed. Someone who skips registration on the bet that the law will fall would still have missed a deadline that was in force at the time.
What the law does
Beyond the registry, the law brings unfinished frames and receivers, the components of so-called ghost guns, under serialization requirements; adds bump stocks, auto sears and similar devices to the definition of a machine gun; rewrites the state’s definition of an assault-style firearm; raises the minimum age for semiautomatic rifles and shotguns to 21; and lets health care providers and school administrators petition courts under the state’s red-flag law.
It also requires holders of a Firearms Identification card who own semiautomatic rifles or shotguns to obtain a License to Carry before their card expires, or to give up those guns. There were 24,215 active FID cards at the state’s last published count, in April 2022. Penalties for registry violations escalate from a fine for a first offense to up to five years in prison for a third.
Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis, which takes no position, sums up the law as “improved tracking; new restrictions on guns; and heightened standards for gun owners.”
The arguments
Supporters point to outcomes. “This legislation both preserves a legal pathway to gun ownership while also putting guardrails in place that keep people safe,” Ruth Zakarin, who chairs the campaign committee backing the law and leads the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, told the AP. The official yes argument says Massachusetts has a gun death rate 70 percent below the national average. That figure holds up: CDC data for 2024, compiled by the Pew Research Center, put Massachusetts at 3.8 gun deaths per 100,000 people, against 12.8 nationally.
The comparison has limits. Massachusetts already had among the lowest rates of gun violence before Chapter 135, and the Tufts analysts conclude that whether repeal would increase gun crime “is very hard to know for sure.”
Opponents argue the registry is both a burden and a risk. A government database could be hacked, Mr. Leary told the AP: “The criminal element will know exactly who has what, where they live. It’s a wish list for nefarious actors for where they can go get guns.” In the official argument against the law, he calls it “a deeply flawed, 116-page piece of bureaucratic overreach,” and he has said it pulls police “away from investigating violent crime to plow through piles of administrative paperwork.”
How rare a registry is
A 1986 federal law bars Washington from keeping a national registry of guns or gun owners, so registries exist only at the state level. Massachusetts became the third jurisdiction with a comprehensive one, after Hawaii and the District of Columbia, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence; six more states require registration of some firearms, such as handguns or assault weapons.
What it means for California
California, often described as having the country’s strictest gun laws, does not have a Massachusetts-style registry. Since Jan. 1, 2014, under Assembly Bill 809, the state Department of Justice has kept records of long-gun sales and transfers, as it long has for handguns, in its firearms records systems. Californians who build their own guns must obtain a state-issued serial number. But there is no requirement that owners register every gun already in their possession, the step Massachusetts made mandatory.
That makes the Massachusetts vote a test of a policy California has approached in pieces but never adopted outright: whether voters, offered a direct choice, will keep a complete list of who owns what.
Massachusetts is not the only state with guns on the ballot. In Idaho, the Republican-led Legislature placed a nonbinding question asking voters to choose an official state gun from six historic firearms.
The Inquirer sought comment from the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, which did not respond by publication. An email to the repeal campaign’s published address was returned as undeliverable.
Anjali Venkatram covers national news and the federal policies, court rulings and trends that reach California, for National News. More from Anjali Venkatram
